Three women booted off plane claim flight attendant was a bully

posted at 4:16 pm on December 9, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Culture ]   

It’s not just It’s not just hassles with the TSA that passengers need to fear when flying nowadays. Running afoul of a flight attendant with a short fuse can result in your being escorted from an airplane by sheriff’s deputies.

That was the experience of three women on a New York-bound AirTran flight out of Palm Beach on Monday. The women, complete strangers who happened to be seated near one another, found themselves huddled together in the face of adversity. That face belonged to a testy flight attendant, whom the three insist was the only bad actor in a situation that rapidly escalated out of control.

The female passengers were buckled in and ready for takeoff when one of them, Marilyn Miller, noticed a male flight attendant attempting to force her carryon bag into an already-stuffed overhead luggage compartment. “Hey,” she said, “I have breakables in that [bag].”

Miller claims that the flight attendant not only ignored her concern but became more aggressive, shoving other bags into hers.

A second woman, Carol Gray, attempted to alert the same flight attendant to the fact her seat was broken and was greeted by a similarly hostile reaction.

Both Miller and Gray maintain they tried to defuse the situation but that the attendant became increasingly irate. Ultimately, to their amazement, he called the gate and asked that they be removed from the flight.

As staff and deputies led the Miller and Gray toward the exit, the third woman, Karyn Schorr, spoke up, saying, “This is crazy, they didn’t do anything. Why are you doing this to them?”

At this point the attendant said simply, “Throw her off, too.”

All three say they were in shock at being led off the plane and back to the terminal. Says Gray in a video clip recorded after the fact:

My seat was broken and it really was. Her bag was being mishandled. And this other woman came to our defense. Those are hardly causes to throw us all off the plane.

The women were not cited or charged with a crime. On the contrary, AirTran offered to fly them to New York on a later flight at no charge.

AirTran’s behavior might be construed as an admission of guilt, but Southwest Airlines, which acquired AirTran in 2011, released a statement on Tuesday that contradicts that reading:

Our Employees are responsible for the safety and comfort of everyone onboard a flight. Our goal is always to mitigate any uncomfortable situation prior to departure. Our crew assessed the environment onboard and ultimately decided to accommodate the passengers on an alternative flight. In addition to booking new travel arrangements, we compensated the passengers—offering a gesture of goodwill for their inconvenience. We always prefer that a passenger walk away with a positive experience when flying our airline, we regret that didn’t happen in this scenario. As we often do in these situations, we will take this opportunity to review the reports and take away any key learnings [sic] that we might uncover.

As for troublesome flight attendants, this is not the first time an individual in that line of work “lost it.” In August of 2010, a flight attendant with Jet Blue went berserk over a heated exchange with a passenger, deployed the plane’s emergency chute, and ran off.

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