To me, the difference between reclining the seat and not reclining it is so little it’s not even worth the effort it takes to recline it. So I understand the guy… but still what the hell. Fuck that guy.
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as an impotent man-child I can firmly say with the distance necessary that she did nothing wrong.
that said were i in his position i would prolly end up doing some passive aggressive things to accomplish “Mission I need more space than I am currently being offered for a thing I chose to do with certain expectations of space available fuck you airlines for putting us here”
edit:
like put on headphones and occasionally accidentally your toes tap the chair with the music.
on accident.
occasionally and off rhythm.
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The airlines brought this situation to a head. Quite honestly in any “standard” seat the person reclining in front of you seriously compromises your seat. You can’t use a laptop and their head is very nearly in your lap. If they are going to keep the seats so close together I would rather no one reclines, that of course includes myself.
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Other facts.
The airline by deliberate design chose to seat more passengers per plane when they knew this would compromise their comfort.
The airline will charge the same for the last row as the seat before the last row.
Once a seat in front of you has been reclined it is almost impossible to use a laptop, which many people expect to do while cramped in a metal tube in the sky for hours.
One more fact and one opinion:
I have lifetime miles of about 700,000 over 20+ years of business flying
I am inclined to think you have less.
Not just that. In my experience, if the person in front of me reclines, it’s virtually impossible to even reach down to get anything from my bag under the seat in front of me.
But, you know, the market will sort this out. /s
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Don’t hate the recliners, hate the airlines.
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Thanks for the legwork.
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And you thought you were (semi)joking:
While I can’t see this type of seat working for everyone (like me), you have to admit it fixes that whole “reclining” issue ^^’. Who knows, the ergonomics may actually work…
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I make a point of being very polite during air travel. It’s an unpleasant affair for travelers who have to carry their own things and sit like sardines. It’s hard work with a stressed out, sometimes poorly behaved public. It’s expensive and hard to do, but how else can you go from San Francisco to Puerto Rico in a day? Who could realistically go further than 500 miles given the average amount of vacation time in the US without flying?
Personally, I try hard to not irritate anyone else, I withdraw into my small cocoon of personal space, try not to think about the cramped nature of the cabin, ignore the spectacularly horrific death awaiting passengers on that very rare flight that does crash, and I let myself slide into a self-medicated coma.
I don’t much care for aggression nor self entitlement. Suing for damages indeed!
He’ll eventually fuck with the wrong person and get the shit beat out of him, and she has made herself soound an entitled ass through the megaphone of tmz. Justice.
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Congratulations on not having a disability that makes reclining necessary. This woman does.
People keep acting like she just blithely could have chosen not to recline. His temporary comfort is being prioritized over her permanent pain. His assault keeps being lessened by her using an accessibility device. That’s right folks, just because something is fairly ubiquitous doesn’t mean that it’s not an accessibility device.
But disabled folks and women see this all the time. Non-disabled people and mens comfort is prioritized over anyone else’s. In fact, the closer one is to the power default of white non-disabled cis-het male, the more one’s comfort is prioritized over the less default individual’s pain or even survival.
I know that I keep pushing this point, but until we regularly and consciously confront this bias we are not going to improve as a society.
Is airline seating a problem? Yes. Airlines should fix things to be more accessible for all. But the root cause of this problem isn’t the seats. The root cause is how we prioritize and reward the default for violent behavior in defense of comfort and seek to punish/intimidate the victim. This could have (and does) played out in a taxi, at a movie theater, in a cafe… anywhere this gentleman or someone like him felt their “space” was being encroached upon by someone lower in the hierarchy. This time it happened to be on an airplane. The behavior is everywhere. Most of the time we just pretend we don’t see it.
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Doesn’t anybody use seatguru.com?
Tomorrow I fly super-cheap on an airline that doesn’t have reclining seats. I do not expect to be comfortable, but I will be getting up to move twice during the flight, whether it discomforts my fellow passengers or not, because I medically need to. Luckily, sitting up straight is the best pose for me for sitting.
I am taking whatever seat they give me, because $50 round trip from snow to sun and back is super-cheap, and I don’t have an extra $100/leg for choosing a good seat, or a “better” airline. Due to telling them about my disability ahead of time, I’ll probably get an aisle seat. But I’m prepared for middle seat near the restrooms - it was $50! I expect nothing.
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I think the correct etiquette is to offer money or drinks in exchange for not reclining a seat.
Does she?
If the airline seats did not recline, then presumably some kind of seat insert could be provided (probably have to be by the traveller) to allow people with a specific disability to sit comfortably.
A colleague of mine has limited neck mobility, making it impossible for her to lean her head back against the headrest, she has to travel with an orthopaedic pillow to make long haul possible (she still has to put up with staff who do not recognise the difference between it and ordinary pillows).
From TFA:
I am not going to demand she show us her X-rays.
Again, I am amazed at all the energy people are expending to defend the violent reactions of a man whose inconvenience is being prioritized over everything else. SMDH.
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No, neither am I, but nowhere I have read stated that she had to recline her seat because she had a disability.
I am not defending anyone, I am certainly not blaming her. But developing her condition to the point where she has to recline her seat in order to support your point is expending unwarranted energy to what is already sufficient. The male passenger behaved appallingly, she was a victim of both violent abuse and an airline who seemed to have gone out their way to magnify her discomfort.
The point is we don’t know if she has a disability or not, because many disabilities are not readily visibly. So jumping to conclusions that she’s just being difficult by reclining and that the guy was within his right to violently threaten her is a major part of the problem here.
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She says she does. Given that disabled people deal with this all the fucking time (“you don’t look sick/disabled”) and that there is no excuse for his behavior, I am going to give her the benefit of the doubt.
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That’s good enough for me, then, and it should be good enough for anyone else.
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No conclusions were jumped to. I read what she said in the linked article and listened to the video.
The point is not that she was attacked, the point is that the airline, which has a duty of care to its customers, failed to assist or did anything to resolve the incident and, in fact went further, to obstruct her from making a video as a form of passive defence. If the airline had taken measures up to and including diverting to an airport and letting the police deal with it, then she could have pressed charges (as she wants to) and the airline could aid and assist her in doing so as it should.
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Not her fault her seat reclines and his does not.
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Anyone defending this man child for his actions need to fall down stairs head first.
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