Which goes back to my original question of why didn't he do it earlier - unless one has God Like Powers, the certainty is that you will have LOTS of time to do things at airports
I don't know whether you have noticed it or not but some people will pray only when they are actually going to travel - whether it is on a bus/train/plane/car -and whether they are frequent flyers or the 2/3 flights per yr pax. I have been flying since 1989 and I have seen all types - religious ones as well as the nervous ones. Like one will pray or say grace just before eating.
It also gets back to the other question - what would you have thought if it had been a young Muslim doing that discreetly at the back of the plane.
I know how the pax/authorities/ airline personnel and some of the FTers would have reacted - send him to Gitmo
BTW he does not have to be a Muslim - just the looks or skin colour or the perception of being Arabic would have made some people cry foul
though some can't differentiate a Muslim from a Sikh man wearing a turban or believe that all Arabs are Muslims, let alone that there are secular Muslims and there are Muslims who are scared of flying like other nervous pax from other religions. Remember the Kafkaesque reaction of some after the Minneapolis ejection of the six imams (one was blind btw and the fact that 3 needed seatbelt extensions were deemed to be suspicious - as if overweight pax on the planes are quasi non-existent since 2001)
I suspect "discreetly" would have been considered to be "suspicious behaviour" and a lot more than just being ejected by cabin staff would have happened.*
Depends on the continent one is flying from
and we would have been subjected to an "in-depth story" of 2 mins on some networks, ad-nauseaum biased breaking news on the usual cable networks and right-wing talkshow bigots would see an increase in their listening audience
* Suggestion for TV news / newspaper, the results should be interesting