A Washington State woman has filed a complaint (.pdf) with the Department of Transportation claiming that she and her eight-year-old son were removed from an Allegiant flight after requesting accommodations for the child’s severe food allergies. He’s allergic to nuts. She says it’s life-threatening. And, she says, the crew were insistent on being able to sell snacks with cashews on board to generate commission.
The family was flying July 7 from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Tampa, Florida. The complaint states that the gate agent agreed to check whether cashews or pistachios would be served on the flight, but failed to follow through. A flight attendant confirmed that they would be, and agreed not to serve them. But another crewmember—identified as “Flight Attendant B”—became enraged at the idea.
- Flight Attendant B reportedly began mocking Shelton and her son, loudly announcing that Allegiant had no obligation to create an allergen-free environment and that cashews would be served. She stated that she earns a commission on snack sales and that removing the family would allow her to sell the cashews.
- Flight Attendant B began loudly ranting that Shelton was “too stupid” to understand the airline’s policies, declaring that she was “going to get them off this plane” while allegedly falsifying a narrative of unruly behavior on the part of Shelton and her son.
The crewmembers tirade continued, they say, while Flight Attendant B made public statements that she was documenting their supposed misbehavior (which the woman says were blatantly false). They were removed from the flight after the captain declared them “unruly” based on the flight attendant’s report.
The family was stranded in Tennessee with no alternative flight available for two days, so they rented a car and drove through the night to Atlanta, buying new tickets from there. Allegiant refused to refund the cost of the tickets for the flight they were ejected from, offering only flight credits.
Flight attendant commission is not uncommon, of course. Cabin crew receive commissions for inflight credit card signups. At Ryanair they have an inflight sales quota and they’re disciplined if they’re not closing sales. It’s not surprising that Ryanair’s CEO wants to limit airport alcohol sales while continue to sell drinks on board.
(HT: Paddle Your Own Kanoo)
Allergies are terrible and this comment section will fill up with unsympathetic curmudgeons. I’m going to preemptively wish that all those curmudgeons burn in hell.
Now unfortunately the airline really doesn’t have an obligation to create an allergen free environment. Even if nuts aren’t served, other passengers may bring them. Kind hearted flight crew can make announcements, but there is no guarantee that everyone onboard will hear, remember, or adhere to those instructions. The median View From The Wing commenter, a loser retiree keyboard warrior with a huge grudge and chip on their shoulder, will insist that they will eat what they want without regard to the needs of others onboard. Again, burning in hell is their just desserts.
For practical purposes if you must travel with a severe allergy:
1. Book first flights of the day, after the cabin has undergone a deeper cleaning
2. Ask that the flight crew make an announcement to refrain from nuts, but understand that practical guarantees are impossible
3. Wear an N95 mask or some such? If this reduces the risk of an allergic response.
Coasian solution: Woman pays Allegiant not to sell nuts.
The way the customer was treated, I am totally with the customer here. I believe firmly that the flight attendant needs to be fired. No ifs ands or buts about it. Fired!
N95 masks are effective in filtering allergens. Those with hay fever should consider wearing them if they do yard work.
Those with peanut allergies should avoid eating peanuts. Avoiding touching them is an added precaution. Airborne transmission of allergens might not even happen.
I don’t want to get Covid. Can I demand a buffer zone so there is nobody in the row ahead and behind? No.
CHA to TPA is not that far. They should drive if they have a nut fear.
Sometimes unsympathetic curmudgeons behave that way because we know the passenger was complaining about a mythical risk:
https://allergyfacts.org.au/news-alerts/allergy-matters-blog/new-research-on-allergic-reactions-to-peanut-in-the-air
For all practical purposes if you need to travel with a severe allergy:
1. Learn the actual level of risk.
2. Pack your own food.
3. Wipe down surfaces where you might touch old nut residue.
@derek. The covid analogy does not work. Although nut allergies are uncommon, not wanting to get covid is universal. You can indeed request the removal of an infectious passenger. The contract of carriage has an explicit provision for the denial of transport to people with a contagious illness. You can also hire bodyguards (or any other travel companions really) to sit in the rows ahead and behind you. You would have to pay for all those tickets, but that is still much cheaper than chartering a private jet.
Driving is not for everybody and poses its own set of risks.
It is impossible nowadays to be allergy-free in any place. I would bring an EpiPen for emergencies.
@John, it is impossible to be risk-free in any circumstances, but it is often possible to mitigate risks. Asking a flight attendant not to serve nuts is one approach. Most airlines will refrain from serving nuts and make an announcement pleading with passengers not to eat their own.
The allergen situation has gotten out of hand in this country. Nearly 100% of the time, most allergies like nut allergies are caused by neurotic parents. They strive to keep their young babies isolated in a bubble, only feed them certain foods, use sanitizing wipes on everything in the house.
Kids need to play in the dirt when they are babies. They need to eat everything they may eat later in life, especially peanuts. They need to be exposed to all potential allergens while tiny so their young immune systems can form. Are peanut allergies a problem in China, where peanuts are used in many foods? No. Studies have shown that farm kids that play in the dirt when young have a far lower incidence of allergies.
As far as allergic kids on planes, make them wear a mask and wear latex gloves. You created this monster by improper raising of your kids, deal with it. Highly allergic kids cannot get a reaction if they don’t touch anything and are wearing a mask.
* just deserts
Burn in hell?
I agree with many commenters. I have been a flight attendant for 25 years. We would have gate agents come down to tell us that we had a nut allergy coming on. The momager would insist on pre-boarding and wipe down the seats. She would emphatically tell us little Johnny almost died twice on other flights. The gate agents made announcements at the podium, we made announcements on the plane. Please don’t eat peanut products. During service, the passengers behind little Johnny were eating PayDays. I popped the brake on the beverage cart and kept rolling. Sometimes it is neurotic parents, psychosomatic suggestions, etc., but most people never knew that people were eating “ deadly allergens “ around them and were just fine.
Get past the allergy issue, that is not what is important here. The actions of the flight attendant is where the crux of the problem is. If true, she falsified information delivered to the captain of the aircraft. based on that false information the passengers were removed and subjected to ridicule. Once again, if true she opened the airline up to litigation. So, if true, she should be terminated and the airline should bend over backwards to make this right. Doing so will be far cheaper than paying attorney fees and likely a hefty settlement. The one thing that casts doubt is the lack of any video evidence – where are social media posts from other passengers?
“Drove through the night to Atlanta…” It’s a 2 hour drive. They must have been going very slowly
Both sides are wrong here.
The FA is wildly out of line in making up a story to get them off the plane. And the parents are wrong to ask that the flight not sell them. The reality is that you can’t make a clean environment–if being around cashews is dangerous then the only thing to do is N95 or the like.
Children with nut allergies grow up and presumably are still allergic. Yet no adult expects public transportation to protect them from exposure to nuts. It is over the top that these parents who feel so strongly that exposure to nuts is life threatening risk putting their child on a plane when driving is viable. If your child must fly, wear a mask, buy the bulkhead seats, be last on and first off, if you see anyone eating nuts near you explain and ask them to stop, bring your Epipen. But if the passenger who brought his own cashews 30 rows back is really a threat, you have no business bringing your child on a plane at all. The FAs behavior was outrageous, but it is Mama’s account of it. Allegiant has a menu of snacks to sell, if nuts are not offered then passengers buy something else. Has to be more to this story.
I don’t understand.
How does me eating cashews affect someone else that has nut allergies? They aren’t eating them, touching them, or in any way interacting with them.
Am I wrong on this?
@Expose your Kids
I did not grow up in the sterile environment you describe, yet I still have allergies. Are you an anti-vaxxer too?
Two wrongs here.
If FA really did this, should be fired, obviously.
Mom should also understand the true risks and how to prepare – N95, alchohol wipes and nitrile gloves would have been MUCH more effective than trying to stop onboard sales.
Finally – the rising allergies having to due with the bubble kids now live in isn’t anti-vaxxer rhetoric, it’s science https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2010/rate-of-childhood-peanut-allergies-more-than-tripled-between-1997-and-2008#:~:text=The%20main%20theory%20to%20explain,%2C%20pollens%2C%20and%20animal%20dander.
While Allegiant does not have to accommodate a nut allergy by not selling nuts as far as I know, they are responsible for the second flight attendant’s actions. I hope that they get sued. In this case the mother already has a law firm representing her. I was on a flight where nuts were not served specifically due to someone being allergic or at least that is what the announcement said. In that case there was no company and personal incentive to distribute them unlike in this situation. To help her son, the mother should have had a tight fitting N95 mask on him and possibly googles to limit airflow to his eyes.
typo: goggles not googles
@Mangar how is me smoking a bong affect someone else that has breathing problems? They aren’t smoking touching the bong, or in any way interacting with it?
Am I wrong on this?
So what if the smoke in the air?
It is like when i Microwave left over fish in at the office, no one is eating it so what is the problem
Or when I eat Hot Weaners with extra stuff, no one is eating it so what is the problem.
Or when i have a massive gas explosion, I am doing it, How does it interact them.
Just curious: if I had an allergy to pet dander, could I get all of the “comfort” and “support” animals thrown off my flight? or would the airline be obliged to rebook me into an animal-free cabin?
I’m allergic to entitled leftist idiots that think the entire world has to bend to their delusions. But nice try at fake outrage, Gary. You did get your soi boi beta cuck sfo/ewr all worked up though.
Nut allergies are usually life threatening. An N95 Mask would not substantially the risk. Passengers with a nut allergy should carry an epipen, but this does not always abort a severe reaction. Someone eating peanuts nearby is sometimes enough to trigger a severe reaction. I would never want to be on a plane where there is a person with a nut allergy and nuts are being served and then have to experience and deal with a preventable medical emergency 30000 feet up in the air.
Pilots often just want to get to the next destination, and will often take the word of a flight attendant. They don’t want a problem midair. It’s unfortunate that a minority of flight attendants take advantage of this power.
Nut allergies should be identified and noted long before boarding the plane.
When you fly an airline in which flight attendants have to hawk snacks to earn a paycheck. People that fly ULCCs deserve the ULCC treatment.
In my opinion, this story is not true. Why? Because:
a. Allegiant flight attendants DO NOT make commission on commissary sales.
b. There is ZERO expectation of an allergen free environment on an aircraft and it is expressly stated in the contract of carriage, which passengers attest that they have read ( but no one actually does) prior to purchasing their ticket.
c. An aircraft is, by legal definition, PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION, no different than a bus or subway. Would you expect everyone in a subway car to toss all their nut products on the tracks?
d. No, you should not ask the flight attendants to make an announcement because by doing so you are asking them to break from standard operational procedures, which they can get in trouble for, and if a flight attendant was put on the spot and agrees, then every other flight attendant they come in contact with in the future is going to be a target for passenger anger, because it opens the door to them saying, “ They did it for me last time.” We are required to do the correct thing, not the popular thing.
There might be some “dropping of the ball” but without being present, none of us can say this. For example, if the gate agent failed to follow through… or if the FA really called her stupid…. but I would guess neither of these happened. In situations like this, the passenger is welcome to wipe down their seat and tray, they are welcome to ask the passengers sitting near them to refrain from nut consumption, but if they don’t agree there is nothing the cabin crew can do about it. The passenger has the option to stay and fly or leave and not fly. If they choose the latter, it does not infer that they were “thrown off.” If the passengers balk, yell, argue, make a threat or anything perceived as disruptive, the FAA rules allow for removal of such a passenger if they are warned but continue to disrupt. In this day and age of everyone whipping out their cellphone to film everything they find interesting, if things went down as she says, we’d all know because it would be all over YouTube by now. Ask yourself, is everyone in this child’s school, church, social and sporting activities, etc. expected to refrain from nut consumption? Of course not. So then why place this burden placed on airlines? If this child’s condition is truly that brittle, renting a car was the correct option and the one that should have been chosen in the first place. Rant over!
@sammons – as with everything, the most annoying person generally ends up in the most preferential position. Emotional support fraudsters and allergy bubble babies are incredibly annoying and whine all the time so their preferences are catered to by spineless corps. Unfortunately those of us with dander allergies just get told to suck it up and deal.
Someone is always allergic to something. The world can not revolve around allergies. If their allergies are so bad they should drive, take the train and then demand that the entire train be nut free or else charter a plane. For those people who say that some places are not reachable by these means – tough.
I was on a BA flight from BNA-LHR a couple of months ago and they announced they had a child with a life threatening peanut allergy. Then they passed out nut packages that contained Peanuts. ??????? Say What????????
I was on a BA flight in Europe a few months ago and they announced that a passenger had a severe nut allergy, and so they would not be able to serve either of the breakfast bar options they had. So the whole plane did without breakfast due to one person with an allergy. I agree with the people that said a person with severe allergies needs to prepare themselves the best they can, but not expect the entire world to conform to their needs. It’s getting ridiculous.
The whole plane went without a trifling breakfast item so that a fellow passenger could make it to the destination alive, Kate.
There is categorically no such thing as being allergic to sitting near someone else eating nuts, seeing someone else eating nuts, being on a plane near nuts, or “nut dust.” It does not exist. This is among the most-studied topics in medical research precisely because of how important it is to get it right, and you can see new papers every year showing the impossibility of inducing a nut allergy by any means besides the allergic person EATING the nuts.
We need to stop having everybody held hostage to pseudoscience and neurosis.
It’s Allegiant.
They can’t fire the F/A – they can’t hire replacement to work in that sweat shop.
Fake news. Didn’t happen.
I am actually a flight attendant with this airline and I stumbled upon this article while browsing. I know nothing about this story other than what I have read here, but let me clarify a few things. We do not make commission on snacks lol I wish we did, but we do not. So that is definitely a lie. Also, most airlines labeled their flight attendant positions, A, B, C, etc.. but at Allegiant, our are labeled by numbers so we have flight attendant one, two, three, and four. We did not have a position called flight attendant B. She must’ve looked that up online without realizing that that’s not what we call ours. So that’s another lie right there. The third lie is that the flight attendants kicked her off. We don’t have the authority to just kick somebody off for health reasons. We have a third-party company that makes those decisions based upon the advice of medical professionals. So somewhere out there, a doctor made the determination, based upon what the mother told them, that it was not safe for her child to fly. So that tells me right there that the mother must’ve said her child has a severe nut allergy that is life-threatening, and that they didn’t bring an EpiPen. That is the only way they would’ve kicked her off. You cannot bring a child with a severe no allergy onto a plane that has been selling nuts all day without an EpiPen. That is a recipe for disaster and completely irresponsible of the mother not to bring an EpiPen. Even if we didn’t sell nuts during that one particular leg of the flight, there were still not sold on the last flight. That also doesn’t mean that there isn’t a passenger who brought nuts from home that they’re eating without us knowing about it. We can’t control stuff like that so if somebody doesn’t have an EpiPen and their allergy is that bad, we have no choice, but to get medical professionals involved to make the decision whether or not it would be safe for the individual to fly. Based upon what this mother told the professionals, they decided it was not safe and pulled them from the flight. Instead of the mother, realizing that she was irresponsible, she should’ve brought an EpiPen, she decided to make up the story with so many holes. It’s ridiculous. People need to learn how to take responsibility for their actions. If she had brought an EpiPen I guarantee you this would’ve never happened. If she had kept her mouth shut and not been entitled and asked for special accommodations, this would’ve never happened. But clearly she wanted to stretch the truth and got online and started researching stuff like flight attendant positions and commission, without realizing that her information was totally wrong. This woman is not only a moron, but I also a bad mother, and a poor excuse for a human being.
Reading the legal complaint indicates that the labels of Flight Attendant A and Flight Attendant B are document definitions for Bailey and Chloe. Further that document doesn’t specifically say that passengers are buying cashews. Even further, the captain made the decision to kick them off. With so many points wrong, any further straw man arguments are moot.
I’m questioning the credibility of how accurate this article is because Allegiant flight attendants do not make commission off snacks nor do they have a sales quota to make.
While it is common for passengers to have a peanut allergy it seems there is information missing as to what led up to the escalation of having to deplane, because that is a rare occurrence.
Unfortunately in this situation the gate agent should’ve informed the passenger that they are served on the plane or the passenger needed to contact customer service prior to arrival so they would be able to make the proper accommodations ahead of time. It is not a policy to not serve peanuts once the staff on the plane find out someone has an allergy the flight attendants will try to accommodate as best as possible. This is also similar to when people have pet allergies unfortunately it cannot 100% be avoided.