Idiot du jour

James Glen is, depending on the source, a British national or an Australian resident, and he is the one currently attempting to explain to Chelmsford magistrates what the fuck he was thinking of when on Monday's Etihad flight from Melbourne to Heathrow via Abu Dhabi he got pissed and told a fellow passenger that he had a gun and a bomb, resulting in the plane being sent to the wilderness that is Stansted airport under the eyes of a couple of RAF Typhoons.

Two RAF Typhoon jets were scrambled to accompany the airliner before it landed shortly before midday.
An Essex Police spokeswoman said a 37-year-old British national was arrested at Stansted Airport.
She said: ''A 37-year-old man, a British national, has been arrested following an incident onboard an Etihad Airways plane travelling from Abu Dhabi to Heathrow."

An Australian resident has pleaded guilty to a bomb hoax on board a London-bound flight that sparked fears of a terrorist attack over British skies.
James Glen, 37, made the false claims on Monday on the final leg of a flight from Melbourne to London's Heathrow Airport, on the same day that 35 people were killed in a suicide bombing at Moscow's Domodedovo airport.
...
Glen, who was "intoxicated", told a flight attendant that a fellow passenger had a gun and had "threatened to blow himself up", prosecutor Vivienne Perry said.

Good idea, James, you complete numpty. Way to go if stuffing up other people's travel plans was the idea, not to mention costing Etihad money and making the RAF use up some valuable fuel (they're on a 30 day account with the local Texaco these days, you know).

She said the diversion had a "considerable financial cost", including charges incurred from the military escort, additional fuel and the cost to other passengers who missed connecting flights from Heathrow.

And this could cost him in a big way.

Glen ... was remanded in custody until March 10, when he will probably be sentenced.
He faces up to seven years in jail.

Oh, yes, that. But I was thinking of something else. As I said at the start, he's being described alternately as a British national and an Australian resident. It seems he's from Ayr originally but moved to Australia, and although it's reported that he's lived here for twenty years and this was his first trip out of Australia since emigrating I haven't seen anyone say yet that he's a naturalised Australian. So it seems a fairly safe assumption that his family and friends and pretty much his whole life are all here in Australia. And now he's looking at a possible seven year sentence for being an überknob on a passenger aircraft, which seems unlikely to play well with the Australian authorities, especially if he never became a citizen.

Right now James Glen is in his late 30s and locked up in a country he hasn't set foot in since he was a teenager, and his biggest worry should be that 10,000 miles away the place he probably now thinks of as home might not let him back in.


PS - for JuliaM, I think The Mail will cover this story once they find a picture of a fighter plane that isn't a Typhoon. ;-)