How Pilot Appeases Stuck Fliers: With Pizza

Airplane delays have been known to lead to bad situations. Enter pilot Gerhard Bradner, who bought all of his stranded passengers Dominos pizza on Monday night, forking over his own money for 50 pies. As KUSA-TV reports, Frontier Flight 719, which was headed to Denver from Reagan International Airport in Washington, DC, was forced to land in Cheyenne, Wyo., to wait out storms in Colorado—for several hours. That’s when Captain Bradner decided he was hungry and ordered the pizzas.

"If the need arises you need to take care of your family; you need to take care of your passengers. They are my responsibility the moment they step on the aircraft until they get off the aircraft," Bradner says. His passengers were very happy—the plane erupted in applause when he announced over the speaker that pizzas were on the way. He didn't get to take a victory lap, however: While the passengers ate, he worked to reprogram the computers so the plane would be ready to depart for Denver, which it did around 10:30pm. (Richard Gere has also gotten free pizza recently.)