I don’t like flying but I wouldn’t do this! — Dan

A lot of people don’t like to fly. The experience isn’t always a great one — even in the best of cases, you need to spend all that time going through security, only to be stuck in a metal tube packed next to people you’ve never met. Sometimes, the person in front of you reclines the chair too much, or the in-flight entertainment doesn’t work, or the person next to you desperately needs a shower, or you hit bad turbulence, etc. It can cause anyone to lose their cool. And we’ve all seen stories of passengers doing just that — disproportionately freaking out for no obvious reason.

But when Steven Slater cracked after a bad flight experience, the story was different. He was one of 104 people on board JetBlue Flight 1052 from Pittsburgh to New York, but he wasn’t a passenger — he was part of the crew. And he exited the plane like no one else in history.

Flight 1052 took off uneventfully on August 9, 2010, and spent about an hour and a half in the air — again, nothing unusual there. It landed at JFK in New York City without incident and taxied to a stop. But before it could get to its gate, something odd happened: the plane’s inflatable emergency slide deployed.

It wasn’t a malfunction. It was triggered by Slater, a flight attendant, who desperately wanted to get off the plane.

Slater, simply put, was fed up with his job. As the New York Times reported, after an alleged incident with a passenger, Slater “pulled the lever that activates the emergency-evacuation chute and slid down, making a dramatic exit not only from the plane but, one imagines, also from his airline career. On his way out the door, he paused to grab a beer from the beverage cart. Then he ran to the employee parking lot and drove off.” It was a ridiculous way to quit one’s job, but one Slater was okay with — at least at first. As passenger Phil Catelinet told NBC’‘s Today Show (via NPR), Slater “was smiling … he was happy that he'd done this,” and appeared to find joy in knowing that his career with JetBlue — and likely in the airline industry writ large — had come to an abrupt end. The incident was so unusual that a Hong Kong news channel recreated the incident, here, using some funky computer animation. (There’s no actual footage of Slater’s escape, but given how much fun the animation is, we’re probably better off.)

But the story was just beginning for Slater. Deploying an emergency slide, it turns out, is dangerous — anyone below can get hurt. (Thankfully, no on was in this case.) And doing so without a proper purpose, therefore, is illegal. Slater was charged with criminal mischief, reckless endangerment, and criminal trespass, and pled not guilty.

The evidence against him was overwhelming, though. No one questioned whether he deployed the slide, or if it was warranted. (It wasn’t.) He claimed that he was harassed by passengers throughout the flight, culminating in an incident where he got bonked in the head. ABC News explains:

But when authorities interviewed the other 99 passengers on the flight, they couldn’t find anyone to support Slater’s description of that interaction with the passenger. Ultimately, Slater agreed to a plea bargain, which placed him on probation for a year and required him to pay JetBlue $10,000 in restitution. (It costs about that much to inspect and repack a deployed emergency slide.)

Slater was a media sensation for a brief moment afterward, allowing him to write a memoir about life in the airline industry (which has sold a fair number of copies — perhaps more than enough to cover that restitution). He no longer works in the airline biz; per most reports, he shifted to a career in elder care.

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Today’s Bonus fact: Inflatable emergency slides have been around since the 1950s. Before then, the solution was much simpler: planes had ropes that passengers and crew could use to escape as need be. As the Royal Aeronautical Society explains (pdf), ropes gave way to the slides because — despite their apparent simplicity — crews needed to be trained to properly secure the ropes, and that process meant the ropes took quite a long to deploy, which isn’t a great solution during a real emergency.

From the Archives: How a Unit Conversion Error Turned an Airplane into a Glider: A math mistake almost caused a deadly plane crash. But good piloting won out.

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And thanks! — Dan