American Airlines flight AA893 from Charlotte to Nassau went mechanical on Monday, and the airline switched aircraft to get passengers on their way. Already delayed several hours, tensions were running high. And a group of high school students on board chose the moment they were on their second aircraft, ready to depart, to stage a mask protest that “lasted for hours.”
American ditched plans to operate the flight, put some of the passengers up in hotel rooms, and scheduled a departure for Tuesday instead.
“Some people’s vacations are ruined. They were only going for a couple of nights. Now, they have to get rebooked,” passenger Stephanie Krzywanski said.
The flight was supposed to depart at 9:30 a.m, but a mechanical issue meant passengers had to switch planes. But then a group of students from a Boston-area high school decided to act up.
“It was bad. First, they were yelling. They were cursing. They were being very obnoxious,” passenger Malik Banks said.
One passenger says “75% to 80%” of the group of 30 were “being terrible kids.” Yet no one was arrested or even banned from the airline. All of the teens were given a chance to fly on Tuesday, provided they wore masks.
For the overnight adult passengers were given a hotel voucher, but “because the students are either 17 or 18 years old, they are too young to get a room, so they had to spend the night at the airport.”
A delay makes the mask experience more frustrating. Teens see themselves as invincible, and in Covid-19 their risks have been much lower than the general population. They likely didn’t have access to either of the two Minute Suites in the airport where they’d have a private room to ride out the delay sans mask (these are Priority Pass-accessible).
Charlotte Minute Suites
Yet it’s still amazing that this far into the pandemic people stage mask protests, as though those are going to end any other way than badly for the passenger. 2400 of the first 3000 incidents reported to the FAA this year involved mask compliance.
At least it’s good and quite admirable that young people have not been brainwashed and actually have the courage to stand up to government tyranny and illogical “government rules”… i wish more people had the ability to think for themselves and not blindly follow the government rules.
I can only hope the willfully ignorant priques were denied access and banned from future American flights.
I don’t understand why they were not arrested – their actions created a serious situation and caused a great deal of costly inconvenience to all who customers and those servicing the flight.
Sounds fair. Hope thwack them a lesson.
Put all of them on the No Fly List for life and see how they feel when they can only get fast food jobs!
IDIOTS and how disrespectful. This is what the radical GOP propaganda has done.
Why weren’t they taken off the flight, and the remainder of the passengers could get to their destination?
Wow! And you guys say that teens are idiots but the goverment keeping ban on travels form UE – but not from Mexico, Croatia, Serbia, Ukraine or Russia, is just brilliant intelligent!
Time to end the mask nonsense. Won’t be much longer….
No fly list for them. I don’t care your age, act like a jerk enjoy the ramifications. The parents should be proud.
As usual, some people ruin things for most people. No better than the idiots texting while driving causing collisions that just delay everyone else.
Any passenger who creates a disturbance on an aircraft or interferes with the flight crew from performing their duties should be arrested, mandatory jail time, and put on the No-Fly List for a specific time period.
Liberals have no common sense. These high schoolers were from deep blue Boston. They were acting like high schoolers without discipline do. Liberals took almost all forms of discipline out of schools and have severely restricted how parents can discipline their kids. Liberals imposed a silly mask mandate that makes already young and active students even more agitated. What did liberals think would happen? Kids magically teach themselves discipline? LOL this is the result of liberal lunacy. You will see more of this until kids are taught some kind of discipline.
This is both surprising and encouraging. I would have figured most teens were more interested in virtue signaling than exposing the nonsense connected to wearing a face diaper.
Wesley, Your kindergarten teach is calling you back for nap time.
Gary – I suspect they are a troll, but @Holy needs to be banned, or would you allow other racially offensive labels on your site?
@Wesley, that’s a pretty big leap there. So solely because they’re from Boston, they are without discipline, and furthermore “liberals” (a term you used 6 times) are responsible for their lack of discipline? Not these young people themselves, nor their parents? And liberals are responsible for mask mandates? I thought that was a federal regulation. So all federal regulations are those of liberals? And in addition to THAT, liberals control school agendas, and actually REMOVED the subject of discipline, or whatever subjects you think would teach the discipline of “discipline” to them, from their curriculum? You know all of this to be true? I question where the lunacy lies.
I am surprised that racists like Holy have an interest in a travel site like this. Go back to your hole, pal, and sleep off your covid. You will like the darkness. Oops, or maybe not.
Oooh, those nasty liberals! They’re the source of every problem aren’t they. No wonder we have 600,000 COVID deaths in the US. I mean the former guy must’ve been a liberal, right? If only we had all listened to him and given ourselves bleach enemas, right?
@Gary – Do you not moderate your comments? Yellow Ching Chongs? Really?
Wesley, it’s time to change your diaper.
As long as people are allowed to behave like savages in public, the behaviour will only escalate. Call airport security, give them 10-minutes to comply, then police should have been called, all the ‘protestors’ arrested and carted off. What kind of a message is sent when they are jerks, aren’t punished and allowed to fly the next day? Stupid question, we already know what happens. Absurd!
I look forward to see the deletion of anti Asian comments above.
In previous post on this blog, anti black comments were deleted. So there is some moderation.
– Penis
Hey Gary and Holy and let’s not forget Wesley
Act like an asstard and get treated as such. Holy and Gary you silly twit, proving you must be a commie Ruskie or on the other hand, you’re just idiots. Either way, you are of no use to anyone so head back to the basement. Hear the flood has been cleaned up and only your bed is wet, well probably not from water
RACIST COMMENTS DELETED!!!!! Celebration party in Mianus.
“They weren’t arrested or banned.” Let me guess, were they Caucasian?
I’m sick of people acting up on planes after the rules are plainly stated to them and NOT being banned. Airlines serve millions of people a year. Cutting off a few thousand idiots won’t affect the bottom line…..
Kids or adults who do not comply with rules should be left at the airport for 24 hrs before being allowed to fly. Maybe they will learn a lesson
Sun Viking 82 your idiotic comment relating thus incident somehow to the GOP is ludicrous!!
Franklin this was NOT a serious situation in any manner. The airline could have handled it like any other business without inconveniencing the rest of the customers.
I find it silly that my wife and I who have been fully vaccinated since January can go to the grocery store, watch a movie, attend church and shop at our local malls all unmasked; but the moment we enter the airport and get on a flight we are suddenly contagious and require a mask. Completely illogical!
When I was 10 years old, I stayed at a hotel by myself because the gate agent didn’t know that kids can’t stay in hotels. At the hotel, I just checked in with a long line of other passengers. So lucky!
“You will see more of this until kids are taught some kind of discipline”
Wait, so you’re simultaneously arguing that the mask mandate was ridiculous but the teenagers were terrible for not following it? Do you want some fries with your contradiction?
bUt dEr dELtA VaRiaNT!!!
People are all wearing masks around their chins in the airports now breathing and talking to each. Even flight attendants on their overnights go out without masks on. Is there even a state or municipality with mandatory mask rules anymore?? Who in the hell are we protecting with the airline mask mandate now??
@Holly – do you understand “freedom of speech” (obviously not). Doesn’t mean you can’t have what you post to a private site taken down, edited or blocked. Also doesn’t mean Gary can’t block you completely.
Read the constitution and maybe you will understand what “freedom of speech” means. Let me educate you in case you are illiterate as well as stupid. Basically means the government can’t throw you in jail for speech (with certain exceptions like threats). Has no standing outside the government and people can be censored, fired, etc for their speech.
They just should have claimed they were protesting for BLM and taken their masks off. The flight attendants amd airline CEO’s probably would have joined them.
For everyone’s benefit – I live in CLT and AA did not ban them (actually flew them to Bahamas today). Also don’t blame Trump or GOP. I’m conservative but doubt a bunch of high school kids from Boston are right wing conservatives. We have become so polarized that all many people do is attack people w the other viewpoint instead of listening and trying to understand their position or where you may agree. I have many Democratic friends and enjoy our discussions- I think we both benefit from them
Whether it is an airplane, a grocery store, a car repair shop, church, or any place else – it is all private property. If the owners of these places stipulate that you must wear a mask, then you have to wear a mask or just go elsewhere with your business. We are still in a pandemic. They are not living in a different fictitious reality – YOU are. We have 604,000+ dead in the USA who would otherwise be alive right now. This is not minor nor a joke. It is not debatable at all. Many countries are still out of control. There are multiple covid variants circulating that are known to be more dangerous and more transmissible. These are facts. Delta variant, Delta+, Lambda, etc. If the owners of these privately-owned places (like an aircraft) want to protect themselves, their staff, and their other customers from YOU, then that is their right. Same as if you were to enter their own homes – you follow their rules. If you don’t want to abide by their rules, go elsewhere.
@Holly wtf
@Holly what are you doing here? You belong in hell. Bitch!
From Holly: “Gary agrees with what I’m saying. They are only deleted because it doesn’t look good.
I’m just being honest and saying what y’all think. I truly dislike people of other skin colors.”
I left out the actual slur, but that’s bad enough. Gary, you need to find a way to permanently block this person unless you’re truly happy in the boat they’ve put you in.
@Sarah, thanks for preserving that. @Holly, don’t come back here again. Your racism is unwelcome. Go to hell.
The kids deserved to be taken off the flight.
But AA needs to grow some damn balls and let the flight continue and quit disrupting everyone else’s life for the actions of a few twits.
They probably just didn’t want to spend the $$$, so they inconvenienced the innocent.
Even if they don’t agree with the rules, that doesn’t mean they don’t have to abide. Everyone knows that. These kids should have been booted off the plane so the other passengers could quickly get to wherever they were going. Arrest them, or at least ban them from the airlines so that they learn a lesson.
Put them all on the no fly list. Guarantees they won’t do it again. And I do t want to hear this freedom speech BS. If they want to endanger others someone has to teach them . Parents obviously aren’t.
Silly imps. They should be railing against the Russian trump conspiracy and looting targets and Walmart’s. How dare they rail for personal freedoms when they could be stealing, burning, looting and generally being leftist idiots with the full cover of the mainstream stenographers and libtards.
It’s time to end the mask mandate on planes – at least for vaccinated passengers. It’s ridiculous given the current CDC guidelines.
@DrOfInfectiousDisease
If it is all “private property”, why are my tax dollars being used to bail it out (against my will)?
To each his/her own…I’m fully vaxxed and I still wearing my mask.
Please stop with the generalization that because they are from Boston they must be “liberals”. Boston has a fair share of “conservatives”. A fair share of “independents”. They have whites. They have blacks. They have Latinos and many other races. They are teens. End of story. Stop trying to justify their actions with a label. No wonder teens in Amerika are so screwed up. The entire country has become so hateful of anyone not thinking like them.
Like every story, there’s another side to it:
https://whdh.com/news/local/winthrop-hs-teens-kicked-off-flight-after-airline-alleges-mask-dispute-with-passengers-on-board/
The odd thing for me in this is that a group of 30 teens, clearly some sort of school, church, or athletic group, had no chaperones? Or did they? How did the adults not reign this in and grab control of the situation before it got out of hand? Or were they part of the problem?
When this group of geniuses hit retirement age, they will own a tent to sleep in and 50 gallon hefty garbage bag for their possessions. I love it!
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
@Lori Lightfoot:
Are you sure its not LightBrain?