Sunday, July 15, 2007
Fly The Friendly Skies, my @$$! Tell us what YOU would do!
Mom and chatty toddler kicked off flight
Woman says flight attendant's anger over child's talking got them booted
Before I have you read this anger-inducing news article I found on MSNBC I want to say a few words...I am outraged by this story because I am a mother and woman and a person who flies. I am also pretty pissed because, quite frankly I think that customer service has gone down the toilet. When I was a little girl, not that very long ago, we traveled often. Travel was and still is for many, a luxury that they afford themselves maybe once a year...for some once in a lifetime. I remember my mom getting me dressed up nicely to go on a plane, saying hello to the captain and getting a nice pair of wings and sometimes even a set of playing cards. I never felt like a piece of cattle, never got snapped at by an irritated flight attendant, no one limited my bags of peanuts even! When do customers start to draw the line...you want cheap tickets but you still expect the people on the plane, the ones traveling with you as well as the ones working on it, to treat you with some modicum of respect! I think they have officially crossed the line...what with demanding obese passengers to buy an extra ticket, to restricting a child from having a sippy cup and now by kicking a mother and her child off the plane for the egregious crime of babbling too much!Please post your comments, as I am going to be forwarding this blog posting on to the heads of the major airlines to let them know we have had enough!
ATLANTA - A woman said she and her toddler son were kicked off a plane after she refused a flight attendant's request to medicate her son to get him to quiet down and stop saying "Bye bye, plane."
Kate Penland, of suburban Atlanta, said she and her 19-month-old son, Garren, were flying from Atlanta to Oklahoma last month on a Continental Express flight that made a stop in Houston.
As the plane was taxiing in Houston en route to Oklahoma, "he started saying 'Bye, bye plane,' Penland told WSB-TV in Atlanta. The flight attendant objected, she said.
When Penland asked the woman if she was joking, she said the stewardess replied, "You know, it's called baby Benadryl."
"And I said, 'Well, I'm not going to drug my child so you have a pleasant flight,'" Penland told the TV station.
Penland and her son were let off the plane and did not complete the trip to Oklahoma, said Kristy Nicholas, spokeswoman for Express Jet Airlines, which flies as Continental Express on behalf of Continental Airlines.
"I was crying, I was upset and I was thinking, 'What am I going to do? I don't have anything with me, I don't have any more diapers for the baby, no juice, no milk," Penland told WSB.
Nicholas said, "We received Ms. Penland's letter expressing her concerns and intend to investigate its contents.
posted by The Silly Wagon @ 9:57 AM
8 Comments:
Oh no! That poor woman! I have no idea what I'd do in that situation. I hope she got the information of a few other passengers as witnesses so they can vouch for her.
"Bye Bye Airplane" would be the least of my worries in traveling with a child. Screaming? Seat kicking? That's what you have to prepare for in flying with kids.
I hope flight attendant is duly reprimanded!
If you mean FIRED when you say "duly reprimanded, then I agree wholeheartedly! This has major lawsuit written all over it.
~Whitney
I read that the other night too & it made me just as angry. The only thing I keep thinking though is that there are two sides to every story. I wonder if there is more to it than this. Surely just that one flight attendant wouldn't have the authority to kick the lady off the plane, right? It just doesn't seem to fit. However, if it really is as the lady says then I would SO be getting myself a good lawyer!
I read this, as well, and I am hoping we get to hear more of the story, too. I agree with bwqueensamantha that there has to be another side to the story and that the flight attendant wouldn't be able to dictate that the mom and son get off without the approval of someone else. Then again, I don't know. I feel for that mom ~ I would have been crying, too, wondering what I was going to do. Had I been another passenger, I might have gotten off in protest. At the very least, I would have written a letter of complaint on her behalf, and I hope some of them did.
That's why I don't fly anymore. I, too, remember the days of plastic wings, visits to the captain, and in-flight meals. No more!
I read somewhere else that the plane had already been delayed 11 hours, too! I'm sure the flight attendant was on edge but this is pretty inexcusable. Still, I can't believe most people are clamoring for a lawsuit or boycotting Continental. This is a regional subsidiary airline and the employee responsible should be dealt with and the family compensated fairly (comp tickets for future travel, etc.), but I don't know if lawyers need to get involved at this point.
This case is totally different in my opinion than the one from last January in which a Boston toddler's family was removed from an AirTran flight when she wouldn't get out of the aisles and be buckled into her seat. Apparently she was screaming and hitting her parents for more than 15 minutes. That seems like a pretty good reason for booting a family... and they still got rerouted and received comp tickets for future travel AND were still indignant that the airline (and all the other passengers!) should have waited for her to calm down.
thats insane. who in their right mind tells a mother to drug her child? sick sick woman is what that flight attendant is.
I had something similar happen to me on American Airlines about a month after 9/11. We were going to Indiana with my husband on his business trip. My daughter was not quite 2 and had just weaned from breastfeeding. And she had flown a few times before and was always great, never had something like this happen.
Take off was okay, but once we were way up, the cabin was pressurized poorly and even my ears were hurting, and soon my daughter started to cry. I tried to get her to nurse, I tried to get her suck my finger to help her ears, nothing was working and she was just crying. She never used pacifiers, so I had nothing like that to help her. And begging a 2 yr old to quit crying is pointless.
The flight attendant began attacking me soon. She was an older woman, who looked like she'd never had children in her life. She begn telling me I had to make her be quiet, over and over again, she would come complain, with her comments getting uglier. She kept coming up and telling me I was disturbing the passengers and that I really needed to shut my kid up. My husband was literally ready to beat the hell out of her, but he was afraid of what would happen if he tried to make her leave me alone since the 9/11 stuff.
So...there I am trying my hardest not to burst into tears and give that bitch the satisfaction. Then as if she hasn't embarassed me enough, she starts asking passengers around me if I'm disturbing them. They all answered "No" and were looking quite pissed at this woman. But still the entire flight, she constantly came over and berated me. So...as we are almost about to descend, she comes over another time to tell me to make her be quiet. I finally have had enough and look up at her and with every ounce of my being prevent myself from crying right there and yell at her "What do you suggest I do?" She has no answer and walks away. A few minutes later she is returns with some candy. Candy for a not even 2 yr old. And puts the package in my child's hand! My daughter threw it at her, hit her right in the face.
Well as soon as the flight is over, I run off the plane as fast as I can. It's very late, so the terminal is empty and I just cry hysterically for about an hour. I am a very shy person and I've spent 2 hours getting humiliated and I just had to cry. Some American Airlines personnel come over and ask what's wrong and my husband explains, and they apologize for her behavior and give us a 1800 number. Oh boy! So when we return home, my husband calls and reports our problem. I wanted that woman fired, but in the end all I got was some bigwig who called my husband and apologized and let us know she was getting an official reprimand in her file. Well big freaking woo.
OMG!! A "flight attendant" (can't call them anything else) that has never known the love of a child or the innocence has the audacity to say something like that? Joking or not...she got scared b/c she thought all the other God loving, children loving parents would bite her head off!
Lawsuit!!!!! :-D
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