Knowing that a celebrity is on your plane is bound to cause a fracas, and passengers of a Sri Lankan airline experienced this inconvenience recently. Salman Khan, who was in Sri Lanka conducting an eye camp, was on his way back to Mumbai when the flight he was on got ‘delayed’.
“The flight UL141 (SriLankan Airlines) from Colombo on December 29, 2014 was scheduled to take off at 11.40 pm. But once the passengers boarded, there was an announcement that the flight would take off a bit late because of a technical snag,” says a source who was on the flight. After nearly half-an-hour, Salman and his bodyguard Shera were seen boarding the same plane. “We figured that the plane took off late because of Salman and not a technical snag as they’d announced earlier,” says the source.
The source goes on to reveal that, on learning this, the agitated passengers were overheard expressing their displeasure to the flight crew. “It was a two-and-a-half-hour journey and everyone started discussing why such special treatment was being meted out to him at the cost of so many passengers’ inconvenience,” says the source.
And apparently, that was not all. Salman was even alighted first after the flight landed in Mumbai on the morning of December 30. “He was given VIP access and was taken out of the plane even before it reached the hangar. Everyone was asked not to hurry to get off before he alighted,” adds the source.