Flight of Fancy

A man from Houston who claimed to have thwarted a terrorist attack on an AirTran flight from Atlanta was not on the plane according to the flight company’s documents. ” ‘After conducting additional research into this situation, we have verified, according to flight manifests [legally binding documents] that the individual that allegedly created a first-hand account of events on-board AirTran Airways Flight 297, a Theodore Petruna, was never actually on-board the flight,’ AirTran said in a statement, which the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was the first to obtain. An e-mail from a Tedd Petruna, in which he told the AJC via a Facebook message Friday was intended only for friends and family, made the rounds online this week after a friend apparently forwarded it to others. In a matter of days, Petruna’s account appeared in chat rooms and blogs and on conspiracy theorists’ Web sites.”