What Is It With Southwest Airlines, Celebrities and Twitter?
Billie Joe Armstrong, lead singer for the rock band “Green Day,’’ was kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight after he refused a flight attendant’s order to pull up his saggy pants. And then he did what celebrities do when they do dumb things, he tweeted about it.
Mr. Armstrong, 37, was traveling Thursday from Oakland to Burbank. That happens to be the same route that Hollywood director Kevin Smith was flying when he touched off a firestorm via Twitter last year after being removed from a Southwest flight because he, the airline alleged, was too large for one seat. Southwest has also had fairly rigid standards on passenger dress, famously removing a young woman from a flight after crew members found her skirt too short. That story, too, had legs and the woman and her skirt ended up on national television before Southwest apologized.
The Associated Press reported that in Mr. Armstrong’s case, a television news producer on the same flight said a flight attendant approached the singer-guitarist and asked him to hike his pants higher. He responded by asking if there weren’t “better things to do than worry about that?’’
