Southwest Airlines appears to have become the first airline to enshrine a no-robots policy into their rulebook, after a Dallas business owner tried to take his 3.5-foot robot for a jaunt through the clouds.
First reported by CBS News, Aaron Mehdizadeh, owner of robot-rental company the Robot Studio, was on his way home from a trip to Las Vegas with his robot pal “Stewie” in tow. Rather than shipping the humanoid-robot or checking it as cargo, Mehdizadeh bought the robot its own seat, presumably to draw out a little publicity.
It wasn’t even the first such incident on a Southwest flight. Just days prior, a different humanoid robot passenger caused an hour-long delay on another Southwest flight, this one out of Oakland, California. In that episode, flight attendants went through a thorough checklist to ensure the robot would behave and that its battery didn’t pose a flight hazard.
The pair of incidents apparently caused such a stir that just two days after Mehdizadeh’s trip, Southwest announced a unilateral ban on humanoid- and animal-robots in the plane cabin, or even as checked luggage.
In a memo to CBS, Southwest said the new rule was put in place to comply with lithium-ion battery rules. Mehdizadeh, however, insists there’s something else going on, because Stewie’s battery was “essentially a laptop battery.”
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