The week-long furore in South Korea over an airline executive who ordered a jet back to the gate after being served macadamia nuts, culminated on Friday, as the head of the airline apologised on live television and said the executive - his daughter - had been stripped of all her executive posts, according to global media reports.
"Please blame me, it's my fault," Cho Yang-ho, the Chairman of Korean Air lines, said in front of a bank of cameras, at one point bowing deeply. Following a Korean tradition of showing public contrition when one's children misbehave, he added, "I failed to raise her properly."
Cho's daughter, Cho Hyun-ah, was on a Korean Air flight that had just left the gate at Kennedy International Airport on December 5, bound for the South Korean city of Incheon, when she ordered it to return so the senior flight attendant could be removed. Hyun-ah had become upset when she was served macadamia nuts in the first-class section in an unopened bag, rather than on a plate.
On Tuesday, after the incident became public, Hyun-ah resigned as head of the airline's in-flight services, but retained her title as vice president. On Friday, Cho said he would deprive his daughter, who is his eldest child, of that job and her other executive posts at his sprawling conglomerate, Hanjin Group, which owns hotel, shipping and logistics businesses as well as Korean Air.
Meanwhile, sales of macadamia nuts are said to have surged. In its Twitter feed, a local retail shopping website, G Market, advertised its macadamia nuts by saying, "This is it: the famous nuts! (Macadamia)." Another online seller promised to deliver macadamia nuts "in an unopened package." An online ad hawking macadamia nuts showed a passenger jet in the background.
Prosecutors are investigating whether Hyun-ah, 40, violated South Korean aviation law, which bars passengers from acts that could endanger a plane's safety, like shouting, using threatening language or otherwise causing a disturbance. local news media has reported that she "raised hell" during the December 5 incident, screaming at crew members. Prosecutors are also investigating whether Korean Air tried to cover up the episode. They raided Korean Air offices on Thursday in connection with the investigation.
She herself faced about 100 reporters on Friday outside an office of the South Korean Ministry of land, Infrastructure and Transport, which is conducting its own investigation into the incident. Speaking in a barely audible whisper with her head bowed, Hyun-ah said she would apologise in person to the crew members she was accused of abusing.
Public anger over the incident bears witness to a simmering hostility in South Korea over the country's family-controlled conglomerates, known as chaebol, which dominate the economy. Widening inequality in South Korea is often blamed on the rapid expansion of the conglomerates in recent decades, and members of the families who control them are frequently accused of treating the companies' employees like subjects.
According to local news media, the scandal has jeopardized Cho's ambitions to win a Government permit to build an enormous new hotel in downtown Seoul. There have been calls online to boycott the airline, and a parody video of a Korean Air commercial (dubbing the airline "Peanut Air") has been circulating.