I’m not sure how I missed this story last week, though it certainly ranks among the stranger airline policies I’ve heard of. Russian low cost airline Pobeda has banned chewing gum from their flights, citing a cleanup cost of ~$1,750 per piece of gum.
Via The Moscow Times:
Russia’s low-cost airliner Pobeda, a subsidiary of national carrier Aeroflot, has banned chewing gum on its planes citing the high cost of scraping off the dried gum left by shameless passengers, news agency Interfax reported Tuesday.
“The ban on chewing gum use has been in place since the middle of June and is connected to losses sustained by the airline,” Pobeda’s press secretary Yelena Selivanova said.
Prior to the ban, cleanup was costing the company up to 100,000 rubles ($1,749) per piece of gum, Pobeda CEO Andrei Kalmikov told news website Gazeta.ru previously.
Are they scraping off the gum with special edition, caviar-lubricated mother of pearl spoons, or how is it costing them ~$1,500 to remove one piece of gum?!
Regardless, my bigger question here is how they plan on enforcing this policy. As someone who obsessively chews gum all day long, I guess I’ll put them on my list of airlines to avoid. Now as long as Transaero doesn’t adopt a similar policy!
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