Green Day front man Billie Joe Armstrong was kicked off of a Southwest Airlines flight from Oakland to Burbank Thursday night for wearing his pants too low. The rocker shared his astonishment with fans on Twitter:
Cindy Qiu, an Associate Producer for San Francisco ABC affiliate KGO-TV’s 7Live news program, was on the plane at the time and shared her story on the 7Live web site:
“Basically, all the passengers were already seated, we were ready to go, they had already told us to start to turn our cellphones off,” she said.
Qiu says a flight attendant walked up to Armstrong and told him to pull his pants up. At first, he dismissed the request asking, “Don’t you have better things to do than worry about that?” When the flight attendant repeated the request and threatened to have him removed from the plane, Armstrong said, “I’m just trying to get to my f**king seat.”
That’s when Armstrong and the person he was traveling with got removed from the flight.
Southwest Airlines was quick to recognize a huge news story and quickly reached out to Billie Joe Armstrong via Twitter:
The airlines later released this statement:
“As soon as we became aware of what had happened, we reached out to apologize for this Customer’s experience. He elected to take the next flight. We followed up with this Customer and involved Employees to get more details and, in our latest conversations, understand from the Customer the situation was resolved to his satisfaction.”
Here’s a video report from 7Live:
And just in case you host a late night television show and need a monologue joke, here’s one I came up with:
Not since Marion Barry has someone been seen getting on a plane with that much crack. Hi yooooooooo!!!
(I masterfully avoided using the obvious Dookie reference, btw.)
Top photo: Billie Joe Armstrong shows off his sagging britches during Green Day’s appearance on the Good Morning America Summer Concert Series on May 22, 2009. (WENN.com)
