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Traveler's Edition
  •   < 1 min read

Have you ever heard of a flight being delayed because someone was doing their math homework? We haven’t either but it happened last week when an Ivy League economics professor was reported as suspicious after writing out some math equations on a flight.

There are about a million reasons why a flight can be delayed and sometimes we think we’ve heard them all, until last week when a plane flying from Philadelphia to Syracuse was forced to turn back and return to the boarding gate after Guido Menzio, an economics professors at the University of Pennsylvania was caught scribbling complex equations on a piece of paper before take-off.

The passengers sitting next to him thought this was suspicious, so she got up and complained of feeling sick and to let her off the plane. Upon leaving the plane, she expressed her concerns that she thought her fellow passenger was a terrorist after seeing him write “strange” things on his notepad. Airline security officials were called, Mr. Menzio was called off the flight and questioned.

After some probing, Mr. Menzio was let back onto the flight and the plane prepared for take-off, again. After a two-hour delay, the Air Wisconsin flight took off, although the woman who complained opted to grab the next flight to Syracuse instead.

Lessons learned here? Leave the math homework at home and instead sit back and enjoy some in-flight entertainment!

Img: Math equation by Ecole polytechnique Université Paris-Saclay / Flickr cc.

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