When Brad Jakoby was asked to remove a T-shirt depicting a Transformers cartoon character before boarding a flight at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 he thought it was a joke.
Brad, from Bayswater, central London, said he had to change before boarding as security officers objected to the gun, held by the cartoon character.
He wrote about the incident on his blog, which some might say is fittingly called The Edge of Madness and it was picked up by the mainstream media.
Go through security, get pulled to the side. I’m wearing a French Connection Transformers t-shirt. Bloke starts joking with me is that Megatron. Then he explains that since Megatron is holding a gun, I’m not allowed to fly. WTF? It’s a 40 foot tall cartoon robot with a gun as an arm. There is no way this shirt is offensive in any way, and what I’m going to use the shirt to pretend I have a gun?
Now here’s the stupid part. I was only taking carry on luggage, so my clothes were in my bag, so I said I’d get changed. So I stripped off at security and changed t-shirts, putting the “offensive” t-shirt in my bag. Now I haven’t been a dick so far, I’ve done what they’ve said. No point in arguing with the drones.
The supervisor comes over and is now a dick to me, telling me if I put the shirt on I’ll be arrested. I then told him that I wasn’t going to waste time arguing with him and he wasn’t worth the effort and didn’t have any power to change anything anyway. With hindsight I should have said, yeah arrest me, great publicity for you guys to arrest a bloke wearing a transformers t-shirt.
The incident, which happened a few weeks ago, has no doubt left the BA press office in a tailspin, with news coming on the day that Giovanni Bisignani, the director general of the International Air Transport Association, described service at the airport a “national embarassment.”
Filed under: Brands, People | Tagged: Heathrow, Terminal 5, T-shirt, Brad Jakoby, Transformers, The Edge of Madness
