Geez, I don’t know WTH is wrong with the airlines these day. United beats the crap out of a doctor only a week ago.
Now this jerk on American Airlines yanks a stroller out of a woman’s hands and nearly hits her baby. She’s crying her eyes out. Then this male Flight Attendant challenges another passenger to a fight.
This is getting unreal. What’s happened to civility and caring about other people? These are paying customers being treated like trash.
It’s like the stress of dealing with the airports, security, and checking in is putting the passengers and the airline crews on hair trigger tempers.
Fly the Friendly Skies. Uh Right, that’s become a sick joke.
My elder daughter is 18 but we had her on a plane when she was a baby and this happened to me. (FWIW it was United.)
We purchased a seat for her but we were having trouble fastening her car seat. The flight attendant was getting impatient with us and said we were delaying takeoff. My husband is a hot head and he told the attendant, “Well, why don’t you give us a fucking hand, then?”
That pissed the attendant off and he grabbed the car seat from me and said “You’re just going to have to hold her in your lap for takeoff.” (To be fair he didn’t actually hit the baby or me with the car seat.)
My husband flipped out then because we’d paid $600 for a seat for her so she would be safe.
A verbal fight escalated to the point where the flight attendant threatened to have him arrested when we landed so we shut up and did what he said.
This was prior to 9/11 so I’m going to guess that’s why it didn’t end in blood.
Nothing that hasn’t been wrong for a long time. Only now we all have cameraphones and are allowed to keep them turned on aboard the plane *and *are on the social networks *and *have developed a culture of exposing incidents. You bet that since last week every time there is heard a stern “sir, ma’am, I must request that syou stop that” on an airline flight, a dozen phone cameras will now rise to aim in the direction of whatever’s up.
According to an article in today’s NYTimes, the CEO of United will not be promoted to chairman. It seems the apparent reason was his lame response to the famous incident with David Dao, which the article called a “public relations fiasco”.
The full story doesn’t seem to be out yet. It sounds like the mom was trying to bring a twin stroller on board despite being told not to (only umbrella style ones are allowed). Then the flight attendant tried to grab it and in the process almost hits the twin in the car seat below. Arguing and crying ensues. Then some unrelated passenger adds to the mix. A person with the airlines (not sure who) poorly handles this guy by suggesting the guy “come at me”. I don’t know if this employee is the person that pulled stroller away.
I’d be interested if the mom was one of those incredibly annoying passengers that insists on bring stuff on board that are oversized (I will love when airlines start to seriously enforce that). A double stroller? That’s clearly too large and could pose a danger to other passengers if emergency egress should occur. Nevertheless, it shouldn’t have gotten to this point. The airline should not have pulled the stroller away. The employee with the “come at me” is clearly making a bad situation worse.
Sure seems like a lot of air rage these days. Don’t airline employees get training in how to handle sticky situations? I thought that was one of their main functions. Now it looks like the dominant crew culture is, “The steward(ess) is always right, so be humble and shut up.”
What happened to the good old days when pissed off flight attendants just said “Screw this!”, grabbed a couple of beers from the cart, activated the emergency slide and took a taxi home? Much more civilised.
Items like strollers are given a tag at the gate. Then you leave it at the walkway before entering the plane itself. This is so that the parents can make use of it up to that point.
Getting a stroller (much less a double stroller) through TSA is a pain. I had to take my daughter out, collapse it and send it through the X-ray, etc. I assume they ask you to walk times up the ramp to the plane for facility in storing it (otherwise someone at the gate would need to do this and it has the potential to leave baggage unguarded).
Just fyi, we were part of a huge bottleneck when TSA stuffed a huge stroller into an X-ray machine and it got stuck. After ten minutes of FAILING to pull it through with much grunting and sweating, they spent another ten trying to pull it back out again. They ended up disassembling part of the machine. To keep from attacking anyone, we passengers coped by positing that the owners of the monster stroller probably also drove an SUV twice as big as it needs to be.
So, double lightweight stroller not so bad. But she should have left it to be gate checked.
Or decked the flight attendant with it (keeeeeding!).
