The latest iteration of Kettles would be pax randomly assigned to the TSA Pre✓ ® line.

See my profile line and see what you make of someone with 70 years of commercial flying calling himself a kettle.

Whoops, sorry I changed that, but it used to refer to me being a kettle.

The 'a' in 'as' should've been capitalized and you also tragically left out the punctuation but I appreciate the correction nonetheless.

The Kettles were neighbors of Betty and Robert Heskett. Betty married Bob in 1927 and they moved to a chicken farm in the Chimacum Valley on the Olympic Peninsula. Betty and Bob had two little girls, but Bob's alcoholism and abuse caused Betty to take the girls and leave in 1931. She eventually (as Betty MacDonald, after marrying Donald Macdonald) wrote "The Egg and I," a humorous rendering of her life as a chicken farmer. She portrays the Kettles as uneducated, crude, slovenly, and having a casual moral sense. The book was made into a movie, and the Kettles were spun off into a serious of films in which they are portrayed as naive and unsophisticated as they are placed in one unfamiliar situation or another.

I don't think a Kettle is necessarily an economy class traveler. In addition, I do not think of Kettle as a pejorative. So somebody is an inexperienced traveler, so what. I've said before that "elites" fly because they have to; "Kettles" fly for pleasure. An "elite" is somebody worrying about getting into Comfort (on Delta) so he can drink alcohol out of a plastic cup on a flight to Des Moines. A "Kettle" drinks in a bar in Rio, and maybe plays "The Girl from Ipanema" while the piano player is taking a break.

I always thought it was to do with the gathering of the economy class pax, who are generally in the majority at the gate, as per the Wiki definitions below.

Kettling (also known as containment or corralling) is a police tactic for controlling large crowds during demonstrations or protests. It involves the formation of large cordons of police officers who then move to contain a crowd within a limited area.

Equally, people may leave the "kettle" through an exit point to the south or west, away from the main protest. As the crowd grows and police perceive a threat, the cordon becomes a permanent "kettle" strengthened by riot police waiting in nearby vans. Nobody can enter or leave - possibly for hours.

kettle1 on the rocks, please!

Methinks that would be kettle1 on the tarmac, please. :D :D :D

Now you're talking gate lice. Most of which are kettles. :D :D :D

I think of kettle as sort of a term of endearment. Simple uninformed people who float through life and always wind up on top. Gate lice, by contrast, know exactly what they’re doing.

Hadn't thought about Kettles until this thread
 

Just experienced a couple of kettles at ONT. Lady in the security line asked the TSA clerk if he knew if she was sitting next to her husband because they had seats 9A and 9B. He actually told her he wasn't sure, but thought seats were lettered ABCD. The lady went on to ask if she was possibly sitting in front of her husband instead of next to him. Being impatient, I told her they were indeed sitting next to each other. Looking at me as if I were lying, she asked the clerk if they should go back to the ticket counter to check. I, again, interjected that she could confirm her seating arrangement at the gate.

I jumped on an Alaska E175 operated by Skywest. I hear the guy in the seat behind me tell his son that we weren't flying Alaska Airlines, but American Airlines.

Wonder if he booked that flight as a codeshare. To him it was kind of AA-ish even though it was a Skywest flight.

Or he was just clueless...always a possibility.

Worse than Kettles are impatient busybodies who barge in on conversations without being asked.

I know, right? Especially when the security line is being held up, eh.