While an American Airlines flight was pushing back and flight attendants performed the safety demonstration, a middle seat passenger told a flight attendant to “shut up,” continued to use their phone and told the crewmember she “couldn’t hear” the safety instructions when everyone else in the cabin confirmed they could hear the announcements clearly.
The flight attendant made clear this wasn’t going to be acceptable. Either they were going to comply and follow crewmember instructions, or they were going to be off the flight. And as for not hearing, “You’re not on my list as someone who can’t hear.” They couldn’t hear the safety briefing because they were talking through it.
Then you see the woman exit the plane – and the ending caption on the video is “empty middle seat is a win for me.”
The standard reaction to this video seems to be, “what happened to sit down, buckle up, fly?” As a passenger on the plane, my reaciton would be “sit down and shut up I don’t want to be late or miss my connection.” Please don’t do this to your fellow passengers. It never ends well. There’s literally zero upside.
Now, many comments across Instagram and Threads argue that the flight attendant shouldn’t put up with this because they aren’t paid on the ground. They shouldn’t put up with it, but that’s not a reason.
- Their pay has always been calculated to cover work on the ground
- But the American Airlines flight attendant contract now explciitly pays this time (rather than just paying higher wages for actual block time). Boarding pay has been in place for five months.
The recording begins with the ‘shut up’. The behavior was bad enough before that to trigger the passenger beside them to record.
“They”? I think there was just one person. We’re not doing that anymore, Gary. We don’t actually have to pretend cutting off healthy breasts is anything but a demonic illness.
She. It’s she.
@Not Scott, it sounded like a man but looked like a woman.
Kinda a like the old Irish Spring (soap) commercial.
“Strong enough for a man, but I like it too”. (Voiced by a woman)
In Europe, this isn’t difficult. Americans are so utterly retarded.
Imagine being so thirsty after praise and showing your peers you’re bEtTeR than them that you think talking tranny speak is a virtue.
Gary: you’re still fat.
@ not scott. Why so triggered? It’s an unspecified pronoun, not the hill to fight upon. Back on topic, people can be jerks.
@Not Scott – read Gary’s blurb again. He uses “she” and “they” interchangeably. Not for political correctness, but for variation in wording and less repetition.
In an instance where we would know the pssenger’s name we would intersperse “she” with “Karen” (or whatever the name might be). Otherwise we might end up with a sentence like this: “She sat in her seat and buckled up, then she took out her phone and she called her mother while she yelled at the flight attendant when she began to talk and her voice was too loud….”
What I would like to mention is the number of typos in Gary’s copy. He should take a minute or two to proofread before hitting Send.
I LOVE the FA’s actions here. This person needs to just grow up, and stop with the attention seeking / entitled nonsense.
If you’re incapable of that basic decency, you’ll get no grace from me, and thankfully not from that FA. Enough is enough.
The FA handled this in a very professional manner and should be commended.
I’m shocked that this person would cause any kind of disturbance onboard an aircraft. This will be more common on AA, UA and DL once Spirit finally pulls the plug. As a passenger, don’t book short connections….instead build enough time in your schedule to allow for a return to the gate to kick Neanderthals off.
While I am sympathetic of the FA, simply being a jerk passenger is not a safety hazard. The FA’s response resulted in significant costs on her airline and potentially huge negative impacts on passengers with connections. What airlines need to do in such cases is let the jerk fly, but then when they land *publicly* give them formal airline documents indicating they are banned for life.
Bumping jerk passengers and then rescheduling them on a later flight (which is what often seems to be the case) as if they got stuck in traffic on the way to the airport, is insufficient to get some people to behave.