Travelers’ tales aloft

The blond woman at the check-in counter is crying, tears streaking her cheeks. She has too many bills, she explains. She is supporting her brother, her family. She’s just a bus driver. She’s stressed, she says, not drunk. Across from her, the man in the Southwest Airlines uniform leans in, nods sympathetically. He understands life can be hard. He understands she is upset.

He’s still not going to let her get on the plane.

From across the walkway in Terminal B at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, a camera crew slowly closes in on the scene. It’s a slow but steady creep, ever watchful to see what kind of reaction it might get. Twenty feet away, 10, five. Soon, it is right there in the woman’s face, the sound boom over her head, the film rolling. She’s on her cellphone now, spelling out her tale of woe to someone else.

The Southwest employee -- customer service supervisor Christopher Marr -- turns to the camera and starts explaining the situation. The woman, he reports, was acting strangely in the boarding area. She smells of alcohol and may or may not be intoxicated. Airlines, he explains, are bound by Federal Aviation Administration rules to deny boarding to any passenger who appears to be intoxicated.

Overhearing this, the woman pulls away from her phone conversation for a moment and breaks in: “No, I’m not intoxicated,” she insists to the camera, which does not seem to strike her as either odd or intrusive. Marr continues with his explanation. The camera keeps rolling. For a random Monday afternoon, this is good stuff.

As hordes of summer travelers make their way through BWI, some -- the angry, the drunk, the stinky, the outrageous -- may find themselves caught on camera as the A&E; Network films footage for its airport-based reality show, “Airline,” which returned for its second season Monday night. Produced with the cooperation of Southwest, the first season averaged 1 million viewers per episode and was filmed at Los Angeles International Airport and Chicago’s Midway Airport. The network expanded to BWI this year.

Since early April, a five-person crew -- producer Scott Mislan, cameraman James “Jamie” Hall, sound recordist Nicole Phillips, production assistant Matt Cohn and Southwest liaison Bob McMahon -- has been prowling BWI, hoping to capture some of the more interesting day-to-day realities of airline travel. Previous episodes have featured everything from an elderly man with Alzheimer’s disease who soils himself at the gate to a guy who looks like a mountain man and reeks so badly that he is given new clothing and deodorant and is filmed washing himself at an airport bathroom sink. There are the ranters who are denied boarding for rudeness to staff, the “customers of size” who are told they need to buy a second ticket and, of course, the drinkers who are sent to dry out. All of them, for one reason or another, agreed to let their stories be aired, warts and all.

“I think everybody in the television industry is amazed at people’s desire to have their 15 minutes of fame,” says Nancy Dubuc, vice president of documentary programming and development at A&E; Network.

Take the bus driver, for example. After Marr rebooks her on a flight that takes off four hours later and gently suggests she stay away from alcohol in the interim, she moves down to the end of the terminal and leans against the wall, still spilling her emotional tale into her cellphone. Now it’s time for Cohn to do his essential job: to get the passenger to sign a waiver allowing the network to use the footage any way it wants.

He approaches. Hovers. Offers a cup of water and tissues. Waits, as unobtrusively as possible, for her to finish her call. She hangs up. Cohn introduces himself, starts the conversation gently. He notices a cross she is wearing around her neck, tries to use it to make a connection. He explains who he is, what the waiver is about, that the show is a documentary. From several gates down, the rest of the crew watches, anxious.

It has been only a few minutes, but Cohn is already on his way back down the walkway. As he approaches, he gives the team a thumbs up. He nailed it.

“I like to find one thing and try to identify with the person a little bit,” Cohn says, explaining his technique. In this case, the cross was his in.

The woman, now identified as Debra Ware, has agreed to sign the waiver and to give permission for a newspaper photographer to take and print her picture. In keeping with its general policy of not releasing any personal information about its passengers, Southwest will neither identify the passengers on the show by full name nor give out contact information for them; A&E; abides by the same rules.

As evidenced in his approach to Ware, Mislan has his tricks for engaging the passenger in the filming process. When Marr turns to the camera and explains the situation, it’s a calculated move: Not only does it catch the viewers up on what is taking place, but it also often prompts the passenger to turn to the camera and speak as well.

So far at BWI, the crew has filmed a hodgepodge of story lines, including an employee injury that resulted in a hospital visit and a unique baggage mishap. A woman arriving at BWI on a flight from her native Ghana was scheduled to connect on a Southwest flight to Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina. She was coming to America for the first time to visit her daughter, who was due to give birth to her first child, and had packed ingredients for a traditional soup she planned to make. What kind of ingredients? Well, fish, for one thing. Fish that, by the time they reached the Southwest cargo hold, were stinking and covered in maggots that had started crawling out of the seams of her suitcase.

“That was an ‘A’ story line,” says Mislan, who likes to rate the clips he sends back to the network. It is up to the network producers to choose which stories will be spliced into the show, which tends to go back and forth between the different airports.

Southwest customer service supervisors Marr and Nicholas Hadeed are miked for their entire shifts; when the A&E; crew hears something interesting happening, they beat a fast path to the scene. Some days, the crew will go the entire 10-hour shift and find nothing to film. Other days, such as a recent Monday, they get lucky: They stumble upon not one but two potentially usable story lines.

In addition to catching Ware’s tears, the crew happens to be by the ticket counter when Hadeed finds himself in possession of two kids -- one 10, one 12 -- who flew into BWI unaccompanied. Just old enough to travel without supervision, the siblings have been taking a renegade tour of the airport. Caught by a United Airlines flight attendant, the two were in possession of Southwest baggage claim tickets and have been turned over to Hadeed for safekeeping.

While he’s clucking at them, the kids see the cameras and immediately start mugging, happy to tell their tale. In midstream, their frazzled mom, Jenny Stanley, arrives. She got held up at security while the plane landed several minutes early.

Once it’s all straightened out, she too agrees to sign the waiver. The kids couldn’t care less. They’re glowing. They’ve scored big time. Not even teenagers yet, and they’ve already gotten their 15 minutes of fame.