Corporate Executives Gone Wild: Businessmen on Plane Chew Through Restraints

Source: Dateline Zero

Two executives who were fired after their employer investigated an incident that involved disrupting an intercontinental flight — including that they managed to chew their way out of restraints after being handcuffed by crew members.

Two Research In Motion executives — George Campbell, 45, and Paul Alexander Wilson, 38 — were simply supposed to take an Air Canada flight from Toronto to Beijing. The successful pair are educated, successful business executives flying to another country to represent their company and their status. Too much to ask of these two adults?

Campbell and Wilson’s inexplicable behavior on the flight either embarrassed RIM, or troubled their bosses a great deal.

The week-long business trip to Beijing was cut very short — the plane landed instead in Vancouver, where the rowdy duo were arrested. A court later ordered them to pay $72,000 in restitution. They also received suspended sentences and were placed on parole for a year.

RIM fired both men after investigating the incident, but little information has been made public. What had gotten into the two? Well, apparently, a lot of alcohol. Court documents obtained by CBC News paint a very chaotic picture:

The pair seemed heavily intoxicated from the start of the flight, according to one passenger. They drank, passed out, and woke up to continue consuming alcohol and yelling at one another.

Campbell was described as a “rowdy and abusive” passenger who at one point warned that he would “off people when they left the plane,” according to the Crown prosecutor.

A flight attendant said that Campbell also lay belly-down in the aisle during the ordeal, and began kicking the floor.

One of the men “assaulted a flight attendant and threatened to punch another,” the prosecution told the court.

Crew members eventually handcuffed the two unruly passengers with plastic restraints and then with tape. But they eventually “chewed their way through their restraints.”

The pilots, believing they could not make the trip to Beijing for security reasons, decided to divert the plane to Anchorage. As the situation continued to escalate they changed course again and headed for the Vancouver airport, which was closer.

During the final 80 minutes of the flight, “several flight attendants and a couple of passengers” restrained the two men and the crew initiated a “lockdown situation” so that no one was allowed to leave their seats.

The prosecutor in the case called Campbell and Wilson’s conduct “way over the top.”

“The repercussions for the company as well as every single person on the plane, both financially and perhaps even emotionally, are going to be huge.”

Air Canada later pegged its losses for diverting the flight at nearly $200,000 and RIM issued a statement saying that the conduct did not fit with the company’s “standards of business behaviour.”