AviationMathematician escorted off flight for doing notepad calculations

Professor Guido Menzio, an Italian-born economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was escorted off an American Airlines flight after a fellow passenger became suspicious of his mysterious scribbling on a notepad.

Menzio was, in fact, working on an equation on price-setting, which was part of a presentation he was going to make in professional conference.

A woman sitting next to him became suspicious of the regression analysis equations he was working on while in a flight from Philadelphia to Syracuse.

The Telegraph reports that the woman feigned illness and passed a note to a member of the cabin crew.

Menzio was asked to come to the front of the aircraft where he was questioned first by the pilot and then an official.

“I thought they were trying to get clues about her illness” [of his next-seat passenger] he told AP.

“Instead, they tell me that the woman was concerned that I was a terrorist because I was writing strange things on a pad of paper.”

Menzio, a renowned academic economist, succeeded in persuading the authorities that his doodles were an equation. He was allowed to board the flight, which left two hours late, without the woman whose suspicions caused the delay.

The Telegraph notes that with passengers on edge because of security concerns, other passengers have been asked to leave an aircraft for behaving in a manner considered esoteric. In May 2013 a flight from Los Angeles to New York made an emergency stop to get rid of a woman who refused to stop singing Whitney Houston songs. In March 2011, a 6’9” passenger was removed because passengers complained he was too tall to fit in his economy section seat on a flight from Portland, Oregon to Ontario.