One of Macquarie Group’s top banking executives in the US was offloaded from a Qantas plane in Los Angeles for alleged disruptive behaviour after refusing to turn off his mobile phone.
The incident on board QF108 resulted in Alan James, a New York-based senior managing director for Macquarie, being offloaded from the plane in LA on May 22 and later stopped from taking a connecting flight to Sydney.
The first incident occurred when a flight attendant told Mr James, who was seated in business class, to turn off his mobile phone while the Qantas aircraft was taxiing at New York’s John F Kennedy International Airport.
The second involved a conversation with one of Qantas’s airport staff at LA International Airport, at which point he was refused travel on another Qantas plane to Sydney.
