Passenger: I Was Kicked Off Flight at PHL for My Tweets

Lisa Carter-Knight says a pilot misinterpreted a joke a passenger made and thought he was accused of being drunk. Then the real trouble began.

All Lisa Carter-Knight wanted to do was fly back to Boston. But the mother of three and “creator of the original Cocktail Competition” (per her Twitter profile) had to wait: Her flight was delayed Tuesday night. Carter-Knight tweeted the delay happened after the pilot accused passengers of accusing him of being drunk.

She later tweeted no passengers actually accused the pilot of this, and updated with a photo of the plane “grounded as authorities board plane for pilot sobriety test.”

You can guess what happened next.

Action News reports the pilot misinterpreted a passenger’s joke and believed he was being accused of drunkenness.

“We had been waiting an hour, so there was a joke by another passenger, that it’d been a long night and he hoped there was a fully-stocked bar on the airplane,” Carter-Knight told the station at 1 a.m. “And the pilot immediately ran out and said, ‘That’s it, everybody back up at the gate. I’ve been accused of being intoxicated.’”

According to Carter-Knight, the pilot said he was mandated to take a sobriety test because of the passenger’s joke. (Good thing that passenger wasn’t saying “Hi” to his friend Jack!) After passing it, the plane finally boarded. But Carter-Knight couldn’t get on.

What’s weird is Carter-Knight’s tweets weren’t all that negative, really: She was mainly commenting on what a strange situation it was. She was stuck in Philadelphia overnight. JetBlue declined comment, but said it would issue a statement later Wednesday.

[6 ABC]