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Hitler’s Tea House

A couple and their four children, who attempted to fly on just three tickets, were kicked off the plane by US Airways flight attendants.

The parents had bought a ticket for their 3year-old son but not for their 20-month-old twins or 8-month-old baby. They planned to seat one infant in the same seat as their three-year-old and each hold a child in their lap.

Kathy and Jason Fickes and their children boarded a U.S Airways flight from Charlotte in North Carolina to Chicago to visit grandparents over Christmas.

The Fickes had purchased three tickets and managed to make their way passed the ticket desk and through security screening with their four children.

A couple and their four children, who attempted to fly on just three tickets, were kicked off the plane by US Airways flight attendants

A couple and their four children, who attempted to fly on just three tickets, were kicked off the plane by US Airways flight attendants

However, once they got on the plane, a flight attendant told them it would not be possible to travel as they had planned because there were not enough oxygen masks to go around.

Kathy Fickes told ABC 7: “I felt we were discriminated against because we had too many children in their eyes.”

Jason Fickes added that they “held up the plane for 40 or 50 minutes” as the family moved seats and tried to accommodate the airline.

The family was finally asked to leave the plane despite one passenger offering to pay for another ticket.

On the U.S Airways website, it is only possible to buy tickets for children over the age of two.

However, in a sidebar it gives the option to add how many younger children will be travelling.

The company is clear that each child under the age of two must be accompanied by an over-18 if they are sharing a seat.

On domestic flights, a child under the age of two is allowed to travel in the lap of a paying adult free of charge.

The Federal Aviation Administration also states that there must be an oxygen mask for each flyer.

Michelle Mohr, a US Airways spokesman told ABC 7: “The safety regulations are such that you have to have one child per one adult.”

U.S. Airways refunded the family’s tickets.

The Fickes family would have been permitted to fly if they had bought a ticket for one of their children under two as long as the child travelled in a car seat.

Adolf Hitler’s tea house, placed on the top of a Bavarian mountain, has become one of the most visited sites in Germany.

German Tourism authorities announced that over 300,000 people visited the tea house in a year. This is nearly 30,000 up on last year.

The tea house on the peak of the Kehlstein Mountain was built for Hitler as a 50th birthday gift by Nazi party secretary Martin Bormann in 1939.

Adolf Hitler’s tea house, placed on the top of a Bavarian mountain, has become one of the most visited sites in Germany

Adolf Hitler’s tea house, placed on the top of a Bavarian mountain, has become one of the most visited sites in Germany

 

Hitler’s Berghof home on the mountain was destroyed by the Allies in bombing raids and after WW2, but the tea house survived and became a tourism attraction in peacetime.

According to officials, most visitors to the mountain are Americans followed by Britons; combined they make up 85% of the people who came to see where Hitler ate cream cakes with his mistress Eva Braun and snoozed in chintz chairs as the world war he started raged.

Germans make up just a small proportion of visitors to the “Eagle’s Nest” tea house.

For 20 euros (about $30) , visitors to the house 6,000 feet up are rewarded with spectacular views and can get refreshments from the privately run restaurant, including roast pork with dumplings and cabbage, salads and sandwiches, that operates in summer months inside it.

There is even a gift shop.

Visitors access the tea house on a bus via a serpent-like mountain road called the Kehlsteinstrabe and enter a golden brass lift built into the mountain side, itself accessed via a tunnel through the granite.

The Kehlsteinhaus (Eagle’s Nest in English) is built in a chalet-style taking 13 months to construct.

The tea house was finished in the summer of 1938 before it was presented to Hitler a year later, but he only made a few visits to the chalet partly due to his fear of heights.

After the war, the retreat place was used by the Allies as a military command post until 1960 when it was handed back to the State of Bavaria.

The new tourist attraction is 1834m above sea level and is perched on a rock wall having cost 30 million Reichsmarks to build (about $180 million today).