Quoted: an eyewitness tells the tale of two RIM executives’ drunken rampage

That’s not something you see in an airplane. It was totally crazy. I had a split-second panic, like “Al Qaeda?!” but then remembered about the two drunk guys.

That was Bernie Lee, a Toronto-based basketball agent who witnessed two wasted Research in Motion executives going berserk on an Air Canada flight. The rest of the story he told Canadian Business is no less colourful. Before boarding, Lee saw the pair causing a ruckus in the airport bar. “I wonder what flight those guys are on,” he thought. “And then when I got to my gate, there they were.” On the plane he saw an attendant issue them a yellow card for disorderly conduct, “exactly like a soccer game, with the notebook and everything. The two guys started laughing and saying things like ‘Holy fuck, what is this, soccer?’” Later, Lee woke up from a nap to see a brawl unfolding in front of him. The executives were eventually handcuffed and tied up in their seats with packing tape. “They looked like Air Canada caterpillars,” Lee explained. “They wanted to put tape over their mouth but weren’t sure if it would choke them… The two guys are still yelling crazy stuff like, ‘I’m going to own this airline! Fuck you! You can’t do this to me!’” With lunatics like that on board, it was no surprise that after the unscheduled stop “the RCMP burst into the plane like we had Osama bin Laden himself on there.”