Saggy pants cost Green Day singer his airline seat

[September 03, 2011]  OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) -- Green Day front man Billie Joe Armstrong says his sagging pants cost him a seat on a Southwest Airlines flight.

The singer-guitarist for the San Francisco Bay area band sent a message to his Twitter followers on Thursday expressing his indignation at being tossed from an Oakland-to-Burbank flight for wearing his trousers too low.

"Just got kicked off a southwest flight because my pants sagged too low! What the f(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)? No joke!" he wrote.

An ABC7 news producer who was on the same flight told the station that a flight attendant approached Armstrong as the plane was getting ready to take off and asked him to hike his pants higher. The producer, Cindy Qiu, says Armstrong initially responded by asking the attendant if there weren't "better things to do than worry about that?"

But the attendant persisted and told Armstrong he could be ejected for his refusal to comply. When Armstrong insisted he was just trying to get to his seat, he and a traveling companion were taken off the plane.

Southwest spokesman Brad Hawkins released a statement saying Armstrong was allowed onto the next flight to Burbank and had told a customer relations agent who contacted him he had no further complaints.

"As soon as we became aware of what had happened, we reached out to apologize for this Customer's experience," the statement read. "He elected to take the next flight. We followed up with this Customer and involved Employees to get more details and, in our latest conversations, understand from the Customer the situation was resolved to his satisfaction."

A University of New Mexico football player was arrested at San Francisco International Airport in June when he allegedly refused a U.S. Airways attendant request for him to pull up his low-riding pants and, later, the captain's order to leave the plane.

The player, Deshon Marman, was held on suspicion of trespassing, battery of a police officer and obstruction of a police investigation when he allegedly resisted the officer who escorted him from the plane. But the San Mateo County district attorney refused to bring charges.

The incident sparked allegations of racial profiling after a photo surfaced of a man who flew aboard a US Airways flight wearing skimpy women's panties and mid-thigh stockings days before Marman's arrest. That man was white. Marman is African-American.

[Associated Press]

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