This is why the "R-word" must survive.

Too bad it didn't attack someone so we can ban these things for a while

I can't imagine having to deal with that during an emergency evacuation.

On the up side, it doesn't highlight up the restroom.

Wasn't kicking the back of the seat in front of it, didn't recline its own seat to annoy the passenger behind, or try to whine itself into a different seat to 'be near family'.

Didn't watch a movie via speakerphone, try to stuff bulky carryons where they don't belong, or start raving about someone not being real....

How was that not a model passenger?

@joel9507

I'll hold my praises or cursing until I see the video of the first one exiting an aircraft during an evacuation.

Hahahaha

RichardC, glad to see I wasn’t the only one to think that.

Lets get this right, people have to go through inspections, x-rays, shoe and belt removal and glaring eyeballs to board a plane. This machine was allowed to walk on?
Giving IT a normal cute name turns my stomach.
Let me guess, the owner of the machine is a"influencer".

quote:

Originally posted by armored:
Lets get this right, people have to go through inspections, x-rays, shoe and belt removal and glaring eyeballs to board a plane. This machine was allowed to walk on?
Giving IT a normal cute name turns my stomach.
Let me guess, the owner of the machine is a"influencer".

Not just the owner, but the robot as well, who's either an "influencer" or "packed with C4". If I was next to the robot, I would be asking it all sorts of questions to see how well it responded to questions without easy answers, and to determine if its responses were trained on an AI DEI data set, and then tell it to have a bad day after landing.

I try not to be that guy, but when I watched that video, and saw the (owner's?) (handler's?) (controller's?) name, the alarm bells in my head drowned out my tinnitus.

quote:

Aaron Mehdizadeh, owner of The Robot Studio in Dallas, TX, flew the 3.5-foot humanoid named Stewie from Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas to Dallas Love Field. Mehdizadeh, who rents Stewie for corporate events, booked the robot a seat using Southwest’s fragile items ticketing option

Took off my tinfoil hat, scratched my head, and said to myself "If this was a dry run, to test security reactions prior to an actual terrorist act, they wouldn't be stupid enough to use an actor with an Iranian surname as the front man. No... instead of a Muslim name that literally translates to "descendant of the guided one", referring to a prophesied Islamic leader who will appear before the Day of Judgment to restore justice and order, they would use something more innocuous-sounding, like Johnson. Right?

link

Then I read a bit more of the article, and saw that this was the second incident on a Southwest flight in recent weeks.

quote:

On April 30, a four-foot, 70-pound humanoid named Bebop — owned by Dallas-based Elite Event Robotics — was scheduled to fly Southwest Flight 1568 from Oakland to San Diego when its presence triggered a more than one-hour tarmac hold. Crew members and ground staff debated how to categorize the device before discovering Bebop’s battery was reportedly four times the legal cabin limit. The battery was confiscated before the aircraft departed. Bebop had also been placed in an aisle seat, compromising the emergency evacuation path.

I did a quick cross-reference of Bebop and Elite Event Robotics and came up with an interview about the Oakland incident, where two of the parties involved are named. Eily and Chana Ben-Abraham are quoted in the piece, with Eily handling the robot, and Chana remotely following the progress of the flight.

Link #2

Wait... Ben-Abraham? Son of Abraham - one of the 10 most popular Surnames in Israel?

Tinfoil hat now firmly reattached, I think it through.
Let's see how tough a new method of smuggling a suicide bomb onto an airliner would be.

*Instruct a sleeper agent to board a domestic flight with a prohibited item that should trigger a response of some kind. Like a battery 4 times the allowable size. Use a name that's common to a US ally. Make note of the response, if any.
*Wait a few weeks, and try it again, adjusting for reactions from attempt #1. This time use a blatantly Arabic-sounding surname to test the perception that the infidel Americans will indeed bend over backwards to avoid offending a (possible) Muslim with proper documentation. Again, note the response.
*Rinse and repeat.

Thank goodness Southwest has nipped this in the bud, closing this hole in our security by prohibiting any human-like and animal-like robots in both the passenger cabin and the cargo hold, regardless of size or purpose. One can only hope that the other US carriers will follow suit. I for one don't trust the Taking Stuff Away goons to suss out a device inside another device. That's just asking too much, right?

And what the hell, Dallas???

[/sarcasm][/paranoia]

But I think Flynn, Greaney, Silva and Thor need to come out of my reading list rotation for a while.

quote:

Originally posted by motor59:
I try not to be that guy, but when I watched that video, and saw the (owner's?) (handler's?) (controller's?) name, the alarm bells in my head drowned out my tinnitus.

You can say that again.

Yeah, I hate mistaking the quote button for the edit button. Fixed. LOL