“Aw Charlie, ghidilhom iduru lura ha jigbru tnejn minn taghna li baqghu l-art.”

This would be disgraceful behaviour at the best of times, let alone when Air Malta is in dire straits and selling coffee to passengers in paper cups for one euro a throw, just like a budget airline except that you have to pay full fare.

You do that willingly to support the national airline, because without the national airline, we would be even more isolated – I always fly Air Malta even when there are other options – and then they go and do something like this, burning up enough fuel to buy coffee for legions.

And that’s just the money – what about the disgusting way in which all the passengers on that plane were seriously inconvenienced, probably also frightened out of their wits, and then two Air Malta staff members, who were travelling on holiday and not on duty, were made to get off the plane to accommodate whatever cronies or Special People were stranded.

But they may not have been Special People at all. I have read this article twice, and it looks to me that something far worse than that – in terms of security, now – happened. I’m left with the lingering suspicion that the flight left with the two passengers’ bags on board but without the two passengers. Hence the panic. Unaccompanied baggage – passengers checking in with bags but then not boarding the flight while their bags do – is the Major Panic Alert of the air traffic world and there are myriad measures to make sure that it doesn’t happen.

Yes, I think that the real reason that plane was made to turn back is because two passengers were left behind but their bags were not. If they had their bags with them, they would have been put on a different flight. And if that’s the case, then there you have the reason why Air Malta is fudging its statements: because this would raise major issues about its security measures.

Either way, whether they turned back to pick up cronies or whether they turned back because they left passengers behind but not their bags, it’s a mess.

On the front page of Times of Malta’s print edition today: