Kremlin: No comment on Aeroflot ‘fat cat’ incident

“I don’t think that the Kremlin must and can make any comment on the situation with the cat and the plane,” Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the journalists today, when asked whether Kremlin had any comment about the recent incident in which Russia’s flagship carrier Aeroflot had booted a frequent flyer from the airline’s loyalty bonus program for sneaking his fat feline onboard, and whether Kremlin considered the carrier’s penalty against its client to be excessive.

Previously, the cat’s owner uploaded a post to a social networking system, telling the story about how he had smuggled his pet cat on a business class flight. After an internal investigation, Aeroflot expelled him from the loyalty bonus program for cheating the carrier.

Earlier this month, the cat’s owner brought his cat Viktor with him on a flight from Riga to Vladivostok with a stopover in Moscow. According to newspaper reports, during check-in at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport it turned out that the feline weighed 10 kilograms, essentially two kilograms above Aeroflot’s weight limit for pets traveling onboard. The passenger failed to convince the Aeroflot staffer to let Viktor onto the plane. The passenger was forced to stay overnight in Moscow and with the help of his friends he found a smaller cat with the same pattern on its coat of fur to have it weighed at the airport in Viktor’s place. The next day, the passenger returned to the airport with the smaller cat, who passed the weight limit test. Once the check-in process had been completed, he returned the smaller substitute cat to her owners, brought Viktor onto the plane and flew to Vladivostok. The incident was widely covered throughout social media.