Delta flight crew threatens parents with jail and foster care for putting child in a seat they paid for

[Medievalist]

@mysterr

the rest of us manage to keep to the rules.

Peter Gabriel - We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37) MILGRAM'S VISUALS

[knoxblox]

@Footface

Everything would be fine if everyone just KNEW THEIR PLACE.

Choose your avatar for this statement:

[popobawa4u]

@Melizmatic

This is what happens when a civilization is built on the fallacious premise that material wealth matters more than anything else in life.

It’s even worse than that! The wealth is not even material, it is symbolic! Material wealth is based upon a thing being useful, whereas with symbolic wealth the important thing is obscuring what its practical value may be so that it can be gamed.

[Cunk]

[lasermike026]

If the airlines are not competent enough to run their airlines safely and kindly maybe they should become a public asset. I would feel much better about it.

[Melted_Crayons]

IF each parent carried a child/infant past the boarding/scan podium and only 2 of the 3 boarding passes were scanned , then the computer cancels all un-scanned reservations 10 minutes before scheduled departure and gives those seats to the next people on standby who are waiting for available seats. IF that happened, it may just be an innocent mistake on the part of the this husband and wife. It could also be intentional and they would later ask for a refund of the unused ticket. Hypothetically.

[markfrauenfelder]

Who cares? In the end, Delta looks terrible.

[mysterr]

@lasermike026

If the airlines are not competent enough to run their airlines safely and kindly maybe they should become a public asset.

You mean like Amtrak? Yeah, no doubt having the government directly operate the airlines would work out soooooo well.

[mysterr]

@markfrauenfelder

Who cares? In the end, Delta looks terrible.

And that’s the important takeaway from this incident? Oookay.

[smulder]

@mysterr

You mean like Amtrak? Yeah, no doubt having the government directly operate the airlines would work out soooooo well.

@mysterr

And that’s the important takeaway from this incident? Oookay.

Holding down the O key on your keyboard doesn’t prove anything or refute what anybody else said.

[winkybber]

I’d have been mightily pissed if I was the standby passenger who was first told I had a seat, then “no sorry” had this gone the other way and the 2-year old was allowed to stay in the seat.

I feel for the staff on flights who have to deal with situations like this. Perhaps instead of getting upset and angry, they should just announce the reason for the delay over the p.a. and leave the plane until the passengers sort it out, Thunderdome-style.

It’s interesting to imagine a world where airline tickets were entirely transferable, however. Thriving resale markets and tremendous flexibility. It might go some way to modifying or even eliminating the obscure pricing systems that airlines employ.

[alahmnat]

@winkybber

Perhaps instead of getting upset and angry, they should just announce the reason for the delay over the p.a. and leave the plane until the passengers sort it out, Thunderdome-style.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

[d_r]

The video here is what makes a clear case case against the flight attendant. The passenger is calm and reasonable throughout, and has morality (if not strict legality) on his side. The flight attendant flat-out lies to the passenger, and then threatens him. At some point the airlines are going to realize that this sort of thing is being recorded, and will have to train their staff the importance of not doing that.

I do hope someone higher in the hierarchy than this flight attendant gets some blame; it doesn’t do the FA any good to try to achieve passenger/seat ratio >1, that has to have been instructions from someone handed to them from above.

[Daaksyde]

@AshGreyOpossum

But let’s also have some empathy here, actually put ourselves into the shoes of that agent there… This issue was delaying their flight, which in turn delayed other flights, was probably a congestion for the air traffic controllers, other families might lost their connecting flights, and so on, and so on.

All because the agent was too incompetent to count to 3 when counting the boarding passes. And then decided to try to cover up their incompetence by attacking a family and threatening a 2 year old. The agent was the one causing the issue delaying the flight and bullying toddlers. Tell us - just how much empathy should we have for them?

Would it be empathetic enough to suggest that apparently watching Sesame Street should be required training for flight attendants?

@AshGreyOpossum

I don’t consider overbooking the problem, because everybody knows that it happen

So if you paid to go skydiving, including a $500 fee for the parachute, and once the plane was at altitude they told you “Sorry, we sold 11 parachutes even though we knew we would only have 10, so you’ll just have to jump without one even though you paid for it.” and threw you out the door you wouldn’t consider it a problem?

Clearly overbooking is a problem - it is fraudulently selling something that the airline doesn’t even have to sell. It would be reasonable to sell options on a ticket on the chance that they might have some cancellations by the time the plane finishes boarding, but not reasonable to go onto the plane and kick paying customers off the plane so that you can sell additional tickets. That much should be pretty obvious. If the people who arrive to board by the time of departure and have a paid ticket can’t all fit on the plane, then the airline has intentionally committed fraud.

[monostatos]

“We are deeply sorry for the unfortunate experience with this video going viral, and we’ve reached out to them to stop embarrassing us. Deltas goal is never to screw people over on camera and in this case this did happen”

The government should address this with a US airlines freedom act to prohibits the capturing and dissemination of video likely to embarrass a US based airline.

[Bobo]

So, for making terroristic threats the Delta crew members will be prosecuted and shipped off to Guantanamo right? Along with all of the execs whose policies enable this sort of shit behavior right?

Okay, first United, now Delta, the list of airlines to travel on is diminishing all the time.

[Frank_Cohen]

Oh Delta… you made the same mistake as United, you turned a customer service issue into a threat to a customer’s bodily harm. Imagine anyone being told they would be thrown in jail and separated from their children. At least the Hawaii Police didn’t make the same mistake of enacting an assault against a passenger. The Police are not bouncers. 4 Chicago police officers are now suspended pending investigation of their assault.

More details on the suspended officers who assaulted Dr. Dao on the United Airlines flight. “it was not an appropriate task for the officers.”

United Airlines Passenger Was Violent in Removal, Police Report Says

[Enkita]

@AshGreyOpossum

The choice of words wasn’t the best one,

I think in the UK it would be actionable, possibly even amounting to impersonating a police officer.

[Enkita]

@hecep

Well, I guess we’re really living in bad times when security people don’t limit themselves to only hassling casually dressed, dark-skinned people who don’t happen to be carrying briefcases.

I was being a little ironic. Perhaps you are one of the Americans who don’t get irony?

Presumably you approve of security guards pulling guns on people for no sane reason? I note that in this thread there is a surprising (to me) number of people actually supporting authoritarian behaviour. Perhaps Trumpismus is actually a result of creeping authoritarianism; certainly between 1980 and 2000 I noticed that airlines in the US were steadily getting more officious, and of course that predated 2001 and its aftermath.

[SomeDude]

@AshGreyOpossum

If people keep trying to cash in from the airlines due to the United fiasco, this will become daily news and flights will get worse.

Hold up. Going public with the news that the airline threatened them with jail, and with permanently taking their children away, amounts to “trying to cash in”? Let me quickly run and get a lobotomy so that I have a chance of understanding what you’re laying down… be right back…