New York: In a one of its kind situation, an Italian economist got stuck in a flight for over two hours after a fellow woman passenger mistook his equations as some special secret terrorist code and alerted the cabin crew.
After the woman said she felt ill, the 40-year-old professor Guido Menzio was taken off and questioned by agents in Philadelphia. He is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Confirming the same, American Airlines said that a 30-something woman expressed suspicions about Menzio and said she was too ill to take the Air Wisconsin-operated flight 3950.
The woman passed on the information to a member of the cabin crew in a written note.
Initially, she told them about feeling unwell but then voiced her suspicions about Menzio's scribblings.
The drama furthered when the plane, ready to take off, returned to the gate and the woman passenger left.
Menzio was then asked to disembark the plane and "met by some FBI looking man-in-black".
He was solving a differential equation, but said he was told the woman thought he might be a terrorist because of what he was writing.
American spokesman Casey Norton said the crew followed protocol to take care of an ill passenger and then to investigate her allegations. They determined them to be non-credible, he said.
Menzio showed the security agents what he had been writing and the flight eventually took off - more than two hours late.
He wrote on Facebook that the experience was "unbelievable" and made him laugh.
"It's a bit funny. It's a bit worrisome. The lady just looked at me, looked at my writing of mysterious formulae, and concluded I was up to no good," he wrote.
He told the Washington Post that he was "treated respectfully throughout" the process but remains perturbed by a system that "relies on the input of people who may be completely clueless".
The woman was re-booked on a later flight.
The Ivy League economist was flying from Philadelphia to Syracuse on Thursday to give a talk at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada.
