Last Monday, a Washington-to-Dallas American Airlines flight was forced to land in Nashville after passengers reported smelling struck matches. Once the plane was grounded, a response team comprising the FBI, the Transportation Safety Administration, and the Airport Authority was activated. The passengers, crew and luggage searched. The bomb dogs brought out. A woman was questioned by the FBI. And she admitted to a crime: striking the matches to "conceal body odor" related to a "medical condition." [1]

According to Lynne Lowrance, a Nashville International Airport Authority spokesperson, the lady was "released without charge and allowed to board another American Airlines flight," although "American has banned her for a long time."

At the time of writing, there are over three hundred articles about this event on Google News [2], and all those I have seen seem to take the original AP story and restyle it. With no real reporting on the story, I couldn't find out what exactly the woman's medical condition was. My guess is something involving a colostomy bag; in the news stories, the medical condition is "unspecified".

What struck me (I'm sorry) about this incident was the stupidity of airline rules and the dilemma facing the woman. The stupidity is that matches (safety matches, of course) are allowed on flights in the first place. Some people might say that matches should be allowed because smokers might need to light up when they get off a flight. But which airports allow smoking these days? The only time you can have a cig anyway is when you've gone through baggage claim and exited the airport. Mind you, others would say -- quite reasonably -- that people should just act responsibly. Blame the person, not the matches.

For the woman, she was faced with the choice of passing gas and offending, or striking her matches -- which, let's face it, she must have known was probably not a good idea. So what was going through her mind when she struck them anyway? Were her farts so foul that she took leave of her senses and struck matches with abandon? Why didn't she take a Neutradol [3]-type air freshener with her? After all, if she had a medical condition (even a recently-diagnosed one), then she must have considered the prospect of anal rumblings.

I don't pretend to have all the answers about airport safety and whether it was fair that the woman was released without charge -- after all, her actions were responsible for a flight being grounded, and a lot of manpower being deployed, all for a few burnt matches.

If I didn't make many jokes in this article, that's because those commenting on USAToday already did a pretty good job [4].