Michael's essay - Airline executive goes nuts

Let's get one thing clear: I know that Macadamia is not a country at the tip of South America whose major export is nuts. For a while there —  I mean Patagonia/ Macadamia —  there is room for confusion, you have to admit. 

Then I read an official statement by Mr. Richard Schnitzler who told a reporter: "If anything should be served on a silver tray, it should be macadamia nuts." Mr. Richard Schnitzler should know what he's talking about. After all, he is the president, the head man, of the Hamakua Macadamia Nut Company of Honolulu, Hawaii.

Prior to reading about Mr. Richard Schnitzler, I had never actually given a lot of thought to macadamia nuts. I'm a pistachios kind of guy. Had I but known that these fat-loaded little nuts would be at the centre of my favourite news story of 2014, I would have paid more attention. Cho Hyun-ah went on trial in Seoul last week on a charge of obstructing airline safety. She has pleaded not guilty (I almost wrote "nut" guilty). If convicted, she faces a possible 10 years in the crowbar motel.

Back in December, Ms. Cho, in a first class seat of a Korean Air Lines plane, was preparing to fly from New York to Seoul. Here's where the macadamia nuts come in. It appears that Ms. Cho wigged out and began screaming because her nuts came in a plastic bag and not on a silver tray. She demanded that the plane stay on the ground until the offending steward was kicked off. The plane returned to the gate, thereby holding up more than 250 passengers.

Ms. Cho, you see, is - or rather was - the head of in-flight services for Korean Air Lines. But more importantly, she is the daughter of the man who runs the airline, Cho Yang-Ho. But that's not the beauty part of the story. The beauty part of the story is that Mr. Cho went on live television to make a grovelling apology to just about everybody. Mr. Cho said he had failed to raise his daughter properly. Now never mind the macadamia nuts and the screaming fit of his daughter; think about the head of an airline going on live television to apologize for something.

Now that flying anywhere has turned into a multi-layered ordeal, other CEOs of airlines might consider going public on live TV to atone their sins. The head of Air Canada, for example, could apologize for ridiculing the suggestion that ticket prices should be reduced now that oil is 20 cents a barrel. Or he could apologize for cancelling flights without telling ticketed passengers. Or the head of Porter Airlines could apologize to Peter Mansbridge and the country for bumping that teenage cancer patient on her way to Toronto for chemo.

At the end of their apology, they could announce free macadamia nuts —  on a silver tray of course.