Passengers on a recent United Airlines flight to Chicago were shocked to find a lewd message greeting them on every single inflight video screen on the plane, although some customers say they found the inappropriate message funny.
One of the passengers shared a photo of their video screen on social media site Reddit, which read: “Welcome aboard flight BITEME1 to Chicago.”
Not a Good Look United
byu/Exiled_In_Ca inunitedairlines
And it wasn’t just displayed once. Further down the screen, the flight number was again displayed as BITEME1.
The passenger wrote: “This is what the in-seat monitor displayed on today’s flight… Not a good look United.”
Some commentators on the post, however, disagreed with that sentiment, saying it was funny and that a little humor was sorely needed. Others wrote: “If this genuinely makes you mad, you need to take it easy. Life isn’t that serious.”
While another person commented: “You’re seriously complaining about the pilots having a bit of humor? There’s enough doom and gloom these days we need this. It’s the small things, man.”
How this message came to appear remains a bit of a mystery, although it could be traced to how the inflight entertainment system is set up.
Some systems require a member of ground staff or flight attendant to manually input the flight number, as well as the destination and origin, while others pull the information from the flight information system in the cockpit.
It could be that an engineer was carrying out some maintenance on the system and then had to test it to make sure it was working as expected. In order to ‘load’ the system, the engineer would need to input a flight number, so they made up something humorous just to get past the login screen.
If that explanation isn’t correct, then it looks like United’s inflight entertainment system has some particularly rude Gremlins at work.
As well as lewd messages on the entertainment screens, some commentators on the Reddit post shared stories about other inadvertently rude messages that airlines had sent them in the past.
Many of these came from the PNR code (passenger number record) that passengers get sent to identify their booking. One passenger said he had been assigned the PNR ‘NEEDBJ’ while others recalled the time that Delta got dragged for sending someone a PNR that read: ‘H8GAYS.’
PNR numbers are, however, automatically created and don’t have any human intervention. It’s perhaps not implausible to ask that airlines program this system to avoid certain combinations of letters!
Have you received any rude or inappropriate messages from an airline by mistake? Share your stories in the comments below!
I work for a company that makes airline software, and our system does have a bad words list that it screens the generated PNR with, and generates a new PNR if it finds a match. That said, we don’t always think of everything and it did once generate G4YBOI, which the passenger was quite reasonable about, but the airline less so.
I got “Fuck Face” once . FUCKFS
I bet the 15% who are legit upset about this are great fun at parties.
“Bite Me” is not lewd.