Before You Try to Film on a Plane, Consider the Plight of Hobo Andy

"Hobo Traveler" Andy Graham, who has posted videos online from Ecuador and scores of other countries during the past 16 years, never anticipated in January 2015 that police would detain him as a suspected terrorist after he recorded some video in an airplane cabin.

Andy and his widowed 81-year-old mother from Indiana were trying to make a flight connection in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Jan. 16th en route to Central America -- where Andy was going to teach potential Expats how to live for less in the "Hobo Traveler" way.

(All details about the Grahams' interdiction were obtained, with permission, from hobotraveler.com and were not independently verified.)

Andy makes videos all the time and posts them on his website -- including three months' worth of reports and interviews in Ecuador during the second half of 2014.  He had recently started teaching his mother Sharry, aka "Mom Graham," how to speak Spanish for their much-anticipated stay at Lake Atitlan, Guatemala.

However, as Andy tells it, he believes a flight attendant tipped off the captain of the Grahams' Chicago-to-Fort Lauderdale flight on Spirit Airlines, about the videotaping.  When Andy and Mom Graham deplaned in Florida, he was met by police officers...interrogated...and informed there was an outstanding warrant on him from 1980 when Andy was in his 20's -- apparently for not having his driver's license on his person during a traffic-stop.

An officer identified as "Officer Donald Randolfo" proceeded to "provoke" Andy and "insinuate" that he had just committed a crime.  Meanwhile, Andy was separated from his elderly mother, who was "alone and afraid."

Then the police took Andy to the Broward County Jail.

"I was detained for being suspected of casing the plane (in order) to make a terrorist attack," Andy has blogged.

During these events, officers openly laughed at his alleged 35-year-old 'offense' and, at the jailhouse, reveled in the irony.

Eventually, Andy and Mom Graham were reunited, released and permitted to fly -- albeit much later than planned -- to their destination.

Andy is now concerned that his updated record will cause harm to his travel-blog business:  that he will be subject to search, interrogation and possible refusal to enter any country he may try to visit in the future.

Andy was so angry about his treatment by Spirit Airlines and the Fort Lauderdale police that he delayed giving a full video report to his viewers for over a week.  As of the end of January, from Lake Atitlan, he blogged that his anger was cooling and indicated he was about ready to respond to posters' questions about recent events.

source: hobotraveler.com