A man who fell asleep flying from
Louisiana woke up at his layover in
Houston, inside a dark, empty and locked
plane.
Tom Wagner says that the United Express
crew left him in the plane, even after he
alerted authorities through his
girlfriend, for more than 30 minutes,
according to ABC News.
The fiasco started on Friday when he fell
asleep in a window seat near the back of
the airplane. When everyone deplaned at
the layover, nobody woke Wagner up. He
woke up in a pitch-black and cold cabin,
and the aircraft doors were locked.
Luckily, his cell phone wasn't dead.
"I called my girlfriend, and she thought I
was crazy. I said, 'Debbie I'm locked on
the plane,'" he told ABC. "I said, 'I'm
telling you the truth. You better go
somewhere and get me off this plane."
Half an hour later, workers boarded the
aircraft and rescued Wagner. He told
KVEO that they wanted him to keep the
incident quiet, and put him up in a
nearby hotel and gave him a $250 flight
voucher to make the ordeal go away.
United Express maintained that its crew
did a post-flight walkthrough and issued
this statement to the Examiner:
Express Jet is investigating to
determine how this occurred, we
sincerely apologize for the
inconvenience this caused the
passenger.
