Jon Stevens Kicked Off Plane Post by: Dan The Internut 27 January, 2011 - 9:41 AM

Noiseworks and former INXS frontman Jon Stevens has joined an illustrious group of musicians after he was kicked off a plane in Perth on Wednesday morning.

Jetstar took the extraordinary step of turning its Brisbane-bound plane around and back to the Perth terminal following a verbal altercation between Stevens and a steward regarding a dispute over seat allocations.

But a ropeable Stevens, who was on his way to Queensland to play in a flood relief benefit concert, told our sister station Triple M that he did nothing wrong - let alone anything that warranted the plane to be turned around and for him to be met by federal police.

“It’s bloody disgraceful I reckon,” Stevens said.

“It’s 12.30 (in the morning)... All I did was swap seats, I had three empty rows behind me, I’m sitting in row one... The plane’s taxiing, I swap seats (and) the guy says to me, ‘get back to your seat’.

“And I say, ‘I just want to have a sleep, it (the flight) is five hours (long), man’, and he goes, ‘no, you need to get back to your seat, there’s a weight ratio problem’.

“So I complied, I went straight back to my seat and I said, ‘look, there’s three guys to my left and there’s only two on this side, there’s going to be a weight problem isn’t there?’”

But as Stevens explained, that tongue-in-cheek wisecrack didn’t go down very well at all.

“The guy’s just glaring at me, you know, he’s got no sense of humour,” Stevens said.

“I said, ‘what are you glaring at me for?’ He goes, ‘do we have a problem?’ And I said, ‘obviously we have a problem’.

“And the next thing you know he’s turned the plane around and federal police have come on and told me to get off.

“They didn’t give me a reason, they didn’t arrest me, I want to make it really clear that I wasn’t drunk, I wasn’t being offensive, I wasn’t being aggressive, I wasn’t swearing, I wasn’t even being loud.”

Stevens added that he wanted an apology from Jetstar for the embarrassment it caused him.

But there was a silver lining to this story with Virgin coming to Stevens’ rescue and ensuring he made his gig with seven minutes to spare!

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• Julie Ramsey says

  I think what Jetstar have done to jon Steven's was just plain outright rude and disrespectful to him how dare that steward be a hero and cause trouble like that I bet he just wanted to have a so called power trip to be able to do that it made him feel good to have the upper hand..As far as Jetstar are concerned they need loads of training in customer service and how to deal with customers properly withouit the power trip they enjoy to be on. If I only was there Boss I would so love to sack some of those employees it makes me never want to fly with that Airline ever again.. and good on Jon for being able to make it to the GIg...
  Jetstar are real Jerks..

  Posted Saturday 5 February, 2011 1:14 PM