Categories: Aviation

Busta Rhymes v FlyerTalk, Round 2

We’ll say one thing for articles about FlyerTalkers, they get around. After we wrote about the incident between a member of the FlyerTalk forum and rapper Busta Rhymes, we spotted it everywhere: People, Page Six, even Fox News.

Millions of people read about Round 1 of Busta Rhymes v FlyerTalk in which (allegedly) Busta Rhymes wanted another passenger in British Airways First Class to take her stuff out of his overhead bin and place it on the other side of the plane (her seat did not have it’s own) and asked “aggressively.”

Her husband stepped in, followed by the titular FlyerTalker who was then threatened by Busta Rhymes and asked for security to escort him off of the flight once it landed. The tail end of that conversation was recorded (we can neither confirm nor deny whether it was a member of FlyerTalk who recorded the video) and wound up on The Daily Mail.

One of the millions of people who read about the incident was Busta Rhymes himself who had a response to “the narrative” being constructed around his flight. He does not call out FlyerTalk specifically, but sends out a message to everyone involved in the story on Instagram:

If you can’t watch it because you’re at work, it can best be summed up by “screw you guys, I’m flying private.” The video ends with a shot of the private plane we assume he took the next leg of his trip in. Whether or not Busta Rhymes knows how well FlyerTalk knows planes is a matter of speculation (Busta, feel free to slide into our comments’ section and let us know you’re a member) so FlyerTalk’s reaction to his video may or may not have been a surprise. But, they were, on the whole, unimpressed:

“[His private plane] Looks like a Phenom 300. The folks who think BA First is tight would hate that little tin can. I can’t imagine flying 12 hours, with at least 2 refueling stops, to get from Greece to NYC.”
“‘Deciding’ to fly privately would be an excellent face-saving way of concealing that he’d been banned from BA…”
“This is why we LOVE FT. We have our FT reporters on the spot whenever there is an incident, we then debate and second guess (like pilot decision-making) for days, have a brief excursion into semantics. Now back to my real novel.”

Does Round 2 go to FlyerTalk or Busta Rhymes? Read more about this incident in the FlyerTalk forum thread 29 July 19: BA112 [JFK-LHR] incident in F cabin. Or, in the mean time, enjoy another hit from Busta Rhymes.