Swine Flu Outbreak Averted on JetBlue Flight

LOS ANGELES and NEW YORK – Alert passengers were lauded late last night when JetBlue Flight 672 from Los Angeles touched down at JFK International where an inflight plane-wide swine flu crisis was avoided.

The trouble began soon after the flight had taken off from Los Angeles International Airport when a man, sitting in seat 11a, coughed slightly. Passengers immediately began screaming, with cries of “run, he’s got the SWINE FLU!” Despite the seat belt light still being lit, virtually all passengers on the left side of the plane began crowding over to the right, causing the pilots to seize manual control of the aircraft to avoid going into a barrel roll.

The man, 51-year-old Ted Bahr, of Laurel Hollow, NY, reportedly jumped up, saying he didn’t have the flu but was on the tail end of a really mild cold, but this did not fool the heavily-warned travelers. According to eyewitness accounts, at that moment a woman screamed, “and,….he’s got a HANDKERCHIEF!” which apparently was the final straw for three rugby players from Ireland who made their move amid the chaos, tackling Bahr and wrestling him to the ground.

The three Dublinites then dragged the man to the back of the plane as he continued to protest and swear that there was no way he had the flu and was not contagious. Bahr was then quarantined for the rest of the flight in one of the rear cabin bathrooms and denied all forms of snacks – even the Terra Blue potato chips - by nervous flight attendants.

Center for Disease Control Director Millard Fillmore praised passengers, saying that this kind of quick thinking and reaction can prevent the epidemic from spreading, saying, “this just proves it’s not a hysteria, just a prudent response.” Eight year-old Chauncey Quinn claimed to have “nailed the guy in the face with a hand sanitizer spray as he went by,” high-fiving his father, Edward Quinn. The rest of the flight was uneventful save the continuous knocking and pleadings from the locked bathroom. At JFK, a hazmat team removed Mr. Bahr from the lavatory following a quick evacuation of all the other passengers.

The H1N1 virus, also known as the swine flu, has killed 1,489 people over the last six months, which, despite being a far lower total than virtually any other flu strain in history, seems to have lodged in the public imagination as the Great Scourge of Our Time.