On December 5, 2014, Korean Air Flight 086 was taxiing toward takeoff at JFK when it turned around and rolled back to the gate. The reason: Heather Cho, a company vice president and the daughter of its CEO, had been handed her first-class macadamia nuts in a bag instead of on a plate. Furious, she berated the flight attendant, summoned the cabin crew chief, made him kneel, struck his knuckles with a tablet, and ordered him off the plane, delaying the flight about 20 minutes with 250 people aboard.
The nuts, it later emerged, had been served exactly as the airline's manual prescribed. Cho resigned her vice presidency — while keeping her other posts as Korean Air chairperson and president of an affiliated company — and was convicted of obstructing aviation safety, serving five months in prison. The airline, meanwhile, was caught pressuring the two crew members to lie to investigators and deleting records of the episode.
"Nutgate" helped popularize the Korean word gapjil, for the bullying arrogance of the powerful. It also sent South Korean macadamia sales up nearly 250 percent.
Previously:
• Nut-rage airline exec released early by appeals court
• "Worst ever" air rage passenger jailed for drunken rampage
