While you can’t technically be thrown in jail for going to the bathroom barefoot, if you misbehave in other ways on an airplane, you can end up in all sorts of trouble. You can argue about how the flight attendant was wrong to make you stay in your seat after you’re off the plane if you still insist on doing such a thing. If you’re not on the plane in the first place, you can’t get in trouble, though, right? As Ireland’s The Journal reports, one man found out the hard way that’s not necessarily the case.
Eoin Michael Cahill was originally supposed to fly Ryanair from Dublin to Copenhagen on January 2 but ended up missing the flight because he extended his stay in Ireland. The next day, Cahill claimed his employer received an email that said he had misbehaved on his flight and was banned from flying Ryanair going forward. Considering the fact that part of his job involved flying to Denmark for work, being banned from flying had the potential to seriously hurt his career, so Cahill sued.
Thankfully, the judge sided with Cahill, saying that Ryanair had know about his complaint for long enough and hadn’t taken care of the issues he had raised. In the end, the budget airline “sincerely and unreservedly apologised [sic]” to Cahill for the way it handled the situation, saying the ban was “incorrectly imposed” and “has been withdrawn.” Ryanair also offered to pay Cahill €10,000 in addition to covering his legal costs and writing a new letter to his employer explaining that the allegations in the previous letter have been “fully withdrawn.”
So in the end, it all worked out for Cahill. All he had to do to clear his name of accusations that he was unruly on a flight he never boarded was sue a multi-billion-dollar corporation, jump through all the hoops required by the court system and hope the judge came down on the side of basic critical thinking. Easy peasy.