Several decades ago, American Airlines was deep in the proverbial and looking for a way out.

They really needed some money and they needed it quickly, so they came up with the innovative idea of a lifetime plane ticket costing $250,000 (£190,000), which would guarantee the buyer unlimited first-class travel.

The idea was that a bunch of people would buy these things and the cash upfront would dig American Airlines out of their financial hole.

Surely the people buying these things wouldn’t actually get enough use out of the lifetime tickets to make it a serious financial burden, would they?

Obviously they did, with the amount they cost the airline stretching into the millions and far outstripping what they initially paid for their tickets.

According to The Hustle, a total of 28 people bought this lifetime ticket before the airline realised their error and scrapped the thing in 1994.

However, since they’d promised unlimited travel for a lifetime, the folks who paid up were still entitled to get on a plane whenever they wanted.

The ticket allowed the passenger to jet off wherever and whenever they wanted (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

The ‘perfect candidate’ for an American Airlines lifetime ticket

One of the buyers was a bloke called Steve Rothstein, a Chicago banker, who was actually contacted by the airline and told that because of how much he travelled, he’d be the perfect candidate to get the lifetime ticket.

He agreed, then promptly cranked his use of air travel up to 11 and booked over 10,000 flights across the next 25 years.

The airline eventually calculated that the ticket he’d bought for $250,000, along with the optional extra to add someone to the package for another $150,000 (£115,000), was costing them a million dollars each year given how much he was using it.

Steve Rothstein paid for a lifetime ticket with American Airlines, but later had it revoked (Caroline Rothstein)

Steve Rothstein’s jackpot investment

They’d had their cash from him and Steve was definitely getting his worth out of them in air miles.

He once flew up to Ontario, Canada, just to get a sandwich and would sometimes let a complete stranger travel with him for free thanks to the extra he’d bought which let him bring a friend along.

Having bought his ticket in 1987 he’d been able to use to to go all over the world, if he heard about something interesting in another country, he could just hop on a plane and go there without spending anything but time.

Steve certainly got his money worth from the lifetime ticket (Caroline Rothstein)

All good things must come to an end

However, American Airlines eventually found a way to nix the lifetime ticket.

The LA Times reported that American Airlines had a ‘revenue integrity team’ which looked at these frequent fliers and found that Steve had booked two seats on a flight about 3,000 times in a four year period, only to cancel over 2,500 of them.

The airline decided he was holding seats until the last minute and offering them to strangers, which meant American Airlines couldn’t sell them.

They judged that this was fraud and declared it grounds for revoking the ticket, with Steve finding out as he and a friend tried to board a flight in 2008 only to be handed a letter saying he’d committed ‘fraudulent behaviour’ and his unlimited ticket was no longer valid.

He denied committing fraud, and later said: “I wish I’d never bought the thing.”