Is Polite Disagreement Becoming Grounds For Removal From A Flight?
forbes.com
forbes.com
That's why I hate commercial air travel.
I exaggerate, but for a reason. If you have this attitude, you will not be surprised at the random hassles you have to go through. If, however, you expect some kind of "fair deal", you're guaranteed to be disappointed.
So yes, they can remove you from a flight for polite disagreement. They can remove you for just about any reason they choose -- especially once you're in the air.
If you do anything that anyone employed by an airline, airport, or relevant Federal agency doesn't like, you're gonna have a bad time. They can and will irritate, inconvenience and humiliate you. Flying in a plane or being in an airport is not a right and they can pretty much do whatever they want to whomever they want.
This is why if it's less than 12-14 hours, I'll just drive.
Furthermore, this assumes that you can burn a day or two to make a meeting a few states over. I'm not sure if you have that sort of time to spare, but I don't.
You could always just remove yourself from the TSA's jurisdiction. They're doing checkpoint stops to search vehicles without probable cause or warrants on the highways now, too. Bonus points for not paying the TSA salaries through contribution to US federal tax income and add-on ticket fees, too.
I've thought of the later option, although not specifically due to the TSA, just generally. If my income was 100% contract and could survive the time zone shift I might actually test it out for a few months, but there are too many positives in the US that outweigh the negatives.
Comparing automobile-related fatalities is challenging.
The standard comparisons given do not distinguish between passenger deaths and automobile-related deaths. 15-20% of all auto-related deaths are pedestrians and bicyclists. It also doesn't differentiate between trip types. Is there a difference between 24 hours driving from NYC to Miami via I-95 and 24 hours of driving within NYC? The published statistics do not speak to that.
I would conjecture if you were able to compare the relative dangers of inter-city interstate/freeway driving to a similar flight (including getting to/from the airport), you'd find that the safety gap was far narrower.
Deaths get labeled as "alcohol related" and double counted all of the time. If I'm walking down the street drunk or riding in a cab drunk, that is tallied as an "alcohol related" crash.
Unfortunately it ends in profiling. So, profiling, or mass death?
Also, for what it's worth, the false positives (profiling) are much more "mass" in nature than the false negatives (death).
Making everyone darker that a given paint swatch go through additional screening is abhorrent, but I don't think it's a false positive.
I am not a psychopath. I refuse to hurt one person to save the lives of a hundred.
Edit: I fully support the stance of the airline and its employees in this case. Why should they go through the trouble to turn the movie off just because I made some bs rules on what my brats can or cannot watch? Blindfold them if you must. This shows how customer demands go beyond absurd.
Note - this doesn't mean i would be happy, or wouldn't attempt to rectify, or generally complain were I punished in innocence. Merely that I would agree it is better on average.
Where this all falls to pieces, is with numbers. how about 50 innocent punished such that 51 guilty do not escape justice and so on and so forth. Where is the line drawn? How do you enforce it? For this I have no robust argument, if one can even be made.
The exact number of guilty people in the ratio doesn't matter. No one can agree on it, and it's impossible to quantify the harm anyways. It's really more about the idea of fair trials and the presumption of innocence, which is a handbrake against tyranny. It's a warning that the fear of letting guilty people go must not be used to justify diminishing the presumption of innocence. This is why Blackstone's Ratio was supported by people like Benjamin Franklin and John Adams whereas a "reverse" Blackstone's Ratio (better to let X innocent people suffer than let one guilty person escape) was embraced by such delightful people as Otto von Bismarck, Feliks Dzerzhinsky (founder of the Soviet secret police), and Pol Pot.
Justifying every little bit of paranoia because you're very very scared of some unknown threat is deeply irrational. Proportional responses are fine - unusual behavior merits further observation or inquiry, not pushing a big red button.
Does that stop anyone from attacking large, concentrated TSA security lines before checkpoints?
Welcome to diminishing returns.
All sorts of businesses can freely refuse service, right? Certainly if they do it in grounds of things like race they will get sued, but generally speaking no business is required to serve you. Airlines are businesses.
EDIT: maybe abusive is the wrong word, but definitely worse in some form.
Yeah, in France it takes a little bit to get kicked out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/fashion/06jets.html
Anyone who is worth >$50 million doesn't fly commercially
I know people worth much, much more than that who most certainly do fly commercially (as well as take the subway).
That is very different in "feel" than what is intended for GA, which is basically Cessna 172s flown by private pilots. Even small commuter airlines have different policies and procedures than a GA charter flight.
Not saying that the stories are necessarily inaccurate, rather, how can we really know for sure without some sort of independent confirmation? I file these under "troubling anecdotes in need of more data."
It's certainly quite believable that FA's would behave this way: their lives are at risk and they have the power to be "cautious" (read: chuck their aggressors off the plain). They also work long hours and tiredness doesn't help with anxiety. Plus there might even be a little of the Stanford Prison Experiment at play here (they have absolute control so are psychological motivated to enforce it).
But even if you're right and those accounts are hugely biased, one question still remains: just how far are you allowed to push a complaint before you're considered a terrorist? Even in the worst case of scenarios, I couldn't see a father of 2 saying anything along the lines of "I'm going to blow this plane up" in front of his own kids when the whole reason for the disagreement was about wanting to shield them from a violent movie. So even with raised voices, why were they considered a threat.
They asked to get near the pilot.. and if you think there aren't parents crazy enough to pull that in front of their kids you probably haven't heard of the westboro baptist church
Wait, they were in the air, and they want to talk to the captain? The person responsible for everyone's safety? Because they couldn't cover their children's eyes during a few minutes of a PG-13 movie?
By all means, ask the flight attendant if they can do anything. But, when they say no, its time to wait until the flight lands and talk to someone. Asking to see a pilot mid flight is very obnoxious and goes way beyond a polite disagreement.
Obviously they shouldn't have diverted, but when someone is demanding to see the pilot, they have escalated to the point where a miscomunication between crew members can cause problems.
Flight attendant: "Someone back here is demanding to see you". Pilot: "I'm not leaving the cockpit." Pilot to Pilot 2: "Lets divert, this is strange"
Obviously he should have clarified whether it was a threat, but when you are overworked, and you have everyone's safety in mind, it makes sense to be extra safe. That is what they are paid for.
I have no doubt that he's been given a strong talking to for diverting a plane and costing the airline no small expense on such a ridiculous over-reaction. They're paid to be sensible risk-evaluators and decision-makers, and this one is clearly rubbish at it.
Overreaction is incompetent decision making.
He was forwarded the request by a flight attendant or possibly the purser. The purser might have been forwarded part of what he said indirectly as well, from the flight attendant, and both might very well have exaggerated the story in part to explain why they haven't just dealt with it, but are coming to the captain with it.
It's perfectly possible that what the pilot hear from the purser was: "Some passengers are getting irate [he got others to speak up in support] because of the movie choice and has been pestering the flight attendants about it and won't give up. He's getting angry, and wanted to talk to you."
Might still be an overreaction, but a very different scenario than what the passenger claims (whether or not the passengers description is correct).
I'm sure the airline have "had a chat", but I also think they'd rather take the occasional cost of a diversion like this than risk having a captain be too cautious in a situation where there's a genuine risk.
Nowhere is it claimed that they asked to "talk to the captain" much less that any "demanding to see the pilot" occurred.
From the source [1]:
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"We asked if the captain has the authority to address this issue, but received no response. A few minutes later we asked for the captain's name (I failed to make note when he welcomed us on the PA system), and was told, by the purser, that we will have to ask him ourselves when we disembark.
Throughout these interactions the atmosphere was collegial, no voices were raised and no threats, implicit or explicit, of any kind were made. The flight continued without incident, while my wife and I engaged our children to divert their attention from the horrific scenes on the movie screens."
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1: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/the-way-...
"In one incident (scroll down to find it) a family traveling from Denver to Baltimore with two sons, aged 4 and 8, asked if a monitor showing “Alex Cross,” which features some violent scenes, could be turned off or retracted, and was told no. They asked if the captain might be consulted. To do that, they were told, they’d have to wait until the plane landed. Then:"
[Added in response to comments below] Critical reading lesson here, if you look at the quote from the article you will notice that it says "they were told, they’d have to wait until the plane landed." That is how you know they were asking to see the captain without it explicitly saying, "They demanded to see the captain."
I think it is pretty obvious that the article is sensational and is lacking the information to fill in the gap on why they diverted and had this guy taken off the plane. His request over the movie is ridiculous but his request to see the captain or have the flight attendant talk to the captain about it is completely ridiculous.
At the very least, he asked the flight attendant to have a conversation with the guy flying the plane about a movie being shown in the back of the plane. On what planet is that a reasonable request???
[also added] I shouldn't have made the critical reading quip, that was rude of me. That being said, we must assume that the author who wrote the article had the facts when he wrote it. If not, we can't rely on any piece of the article at all. At the very least, everyone can agree that the article does not have the full story. I hope we can also agree that it is likely sensationalized. We may not be able to agree that he asked to speak with the captain, but we should be able to agree that he did ask the flight attendant to speak with a pilot at the very least.
Additionally, I hope we can all agree that asking the flight attendant to speak with the captain about a movie playing is an unreasonable request. Even more so, we can agree that diverting the plane for a person not getting up from their seat and not yelling or making threats is probably the wrong decision.
One thing we don't know though, is whether he was up from his seat. If he was standing in the flight bridge asking to speak to the captain, that would make this situation much different than if he were sitting in his seat.
2) Asking if the "captain might be consulted" and "asking to speak to the captain" are not the same thing. The claim that they were "demanding to see the pilot" is something you apparently imagined.
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In response to the parent edit:
>Critical reading lesson here, if you look at the quote from the article you will notice that it says "they were told, they’d have to wait until the plane landed."
The fact that you're continuing to argue based on second/third hand language chosen by the writer of the article, against a direct quote from the source makes this "critical reading" quip particularly ironic.
No, that is how you know they'd made a request that the flight attendant wasn't willing to answer. Whether that request is - as claimed in the article - for the captains name, or something else is not something we can know for sure, but the source does not provide any basis for your assumption that they asked to see the captain.
It is fairly amusing that you start your edit with "Critical reading lesson here" and go on to jump to totally unsubstantiated conclusions.
It is perfectly possible that this guy is lying through his teeth about the real reason, given that we only have one side of the store, but his reliability is a separate matter.
> At the very least, he asked the flight attendant to have a conversation with the guy flying the plane about a movie being shown in the back of the plane. On what planet is that a reasonable request???
On any planet where his subordinates claim not to have authority to make decisions affecting passengers about what is going on elsewhere in the plane.
Either the airline needs to delegate authority for matters like these, or they have to accept that customers will make requests for requests to be considered by the captain, whether or not the airline staff opts to ignore them
In any case this fantasy of the pilots as someone who needs to spend every second concentrating on keeping you in the air is of recent origin and has no basis in reality. There's not long history of planes falling out of the air because the pilot had to spend a few moments answering questions relayed through a staff of trained professionals who surely do know when they should not interrupt. For that matter, on my first flight as a 10 year old I was brought to the cabin and got to talk to the pilot, and that was normal at the time (1985). The only reason it isn't these days is fear of the passengers, not fear that the pilot might be unable to keep the plane up.
[edit:
> Additionally, I hope we can all agree that asking the flight attendant to speak with the captain about a movie playing is an unreasonable request.
No, we can't. As I described above, it is not unusual for the captain to deal with requests from the cabin crew, and if the airline does not believe the captain should deal with this type of request then they should delegate the responsibility to the purser. If nothing else this situation demonstrates that a cabin crew that is unable to make effective decisions on their own leads to undesirable situations that might very well have been avoided if authority had been properly delegated.
Further, even if we were to agree that it would be unreasonable for the flight attendant or purser to actually forward the request to the captain, I would not agree that it would be unreasonable for a passenger to ask when faced with a purser that claims to not have authority to consider his grievance, as long as said passenger did not then escalate things if told that it was against airline policy.
> Even more so, we can agree that diverting the plane for a person not getting up from their seat and not yelling or making threats is probably the wrong decision.
That, and the rest of your edit, we can agree about.
I don't think it's unreasonable at all. It takes all of a few seconds. You don't have much of an escalation path on a plane. And if they insist on showing something on the monitors you object to, I don't know where else one might go. I guess one could try to hack the TVs, but that seems less reasonable IMO.
Even if the FA's had contacted the pilot (which obviously they did, just with a different "issue"), there would have been no danger to the flight. If something is going wrong up front, they won't answer the cabin phone.
Using "they wanted to ask the captian" as a tacit way of approving this behavior is just wrong.
You are aware they have phones, right? The flight attendants are regularly in contact with the pilot and copilot without compromising security at any time.
Flight attendant: "Someone back here has some issues they want to run by you"
Pilot: "What is it?"
Flight attendant: "They think the language is too coarse in the movie."
Pilot: "Tell them to suck bollocks."
Flight attendant -> Passenger: "Sorry, Sir. The captain won't do anything about it."
I'm sorry, this part of your statement is stupid. It is ridiculous and degrading to expect a parent to physically cover their childrens' eyes during the violent parts of _Alex Cross_. These people didn't sign up for a PG13 movie viewing experience, they signed up for a flight.
Rob Cohen, the director, corroborates:
"When I read your piece this morning, I felt extremely sympathetic to the family involved and, in some ways, quite apologetic. I never made the film to cause anyone this kind of discomfort. It seems to me they (the family) were well within their rights to request some control as to what their two young children were exposed. As a father of five year old triplets, I, too, would not want them to absorb some of the images we created for my film.... PG-13 should mean what it does at the box office, at the very least meaning no one under 13 should be exposed to it. If the airlines cannot accommodate a more flexible presentation giving seats the option of viewing or not, they shouldn't show the film unless it meets what we could call "general cabin" suitability."
I generally avoid United because of the older planes and bad service. However, my flight to Ithaca was delayed and I would have been stranded in Detroit, so I rebooked on the redeye on United last Wednesday.
I have never seen such a rude flight crew. It was unreal. Besides just regular rudeness in how they addressed people in order to get them to put their seats forward, put away phones, etc, there was one incident that really takes the cake.
After boarding had started, a woman ran to the restroom in the far rear of the plane. She was in there for several minutes, but this shouldn't have been an issue since she boarded early and people were still in the aisles trying to get bags put away. The plane didn't leave for at least 10 minutes after this.
So a crewmember knocked on the door to the bathroom, and told the woman that she needed to hurry up. She replied that it would just be a moment, and apologized. The crewmember then yelled that she was delaying the plane from departure (obviously a lie, but she couldn't tell from inside the bathroom). So a few seconds later she finally comes out looking embarassed, and the crewmember asked her, very loudly, "What's the matter? Are you sick or something?". The woman looked like she was going to die of embarrassment. She quietly replied that she was 2 months pregnant, and having morning sickness. Then she pushed her way to her seat trying not to make eye contact with anyone.
The other passengers in the rear of the plane with me were looking at each other in amazement. One gentleman said, fairly loudly, "what the fuck".
So now not only will I avoid United because they are a shitty airline, I will refuse to fly on their planes because they are incredible assholes. It is worth a few dollars to fly another airline and not reward United's unbelievably abusive behavior.
The question is, was the behavior of the passengers a credible threat? My guess is that the TSA & the airline (the pilots employer) have told him to put anyone off if there is even a hint of noncompliance.
One of my favorite "hidden" quotes from the movie Brazil may be applicable: "Suspicion Breeds Confidence"
Here's a personal story (and sure, it could be an exception): I love martial-arts-weapons. I'm trained with the rope dart, meteor hammer, chain whip, twin hooks, etc. Anyway, I've been trying to learn the butterfly knife/balisong. Since they're illegal in Canada, I bought a practice balisong, which looks like a real knife, but just has a dull blade with holes in it so it can't be sharpened. I completely forgot I had it in my carry-on bag.
Security stopped me, several officers (airport security and police, if I'm not mistaken) gathered around after they closed off the line. I could easily have been polite here, and got myself kicked out or arrested. I could've said, "Sir, I know you're just doing your job, but this is perfectly legal and I have every right to keep it. As you can see, it isn't sharp." I could've gone on to quote my civil liberties, and explain how no one could mistake it for a real knife because it has holes. It'd be hard to argue that this wasn't polite--but really, where would it have gotten me?
Instead, I took deep exaggerated sigh, put my hands over my face and said "I'm so sorry--I completely forgot!" I explained exactly what it was for, and added on, "it's for tricks only". After showing them how to open it and proving it was blunt, I asked for it, and showed them a few tricks. Again, I apologized and explained how I never meant to bring it. A few well-placed smiles later, the security offered to mail it to my home address, and let me pass without any issues.
So once again, being "polite" isn't the whole story. Playing to the people you're dealing with is the key to getting things done.
In addition to being polite, you have to kiss a little ass.
This story doesn't so much tell us about all this power they have to kick you off the plane. It should illuminate the craziness of the people to whom that power has been given.
Of all the flights I have personally been on the only time there has been a real issue of passenger safety is when the drunk who wont sit down or or demands to get off the plane mid-flight and yet they continue to make alcohol available on flights.
[1]http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2290462/What-way-tre...
> Armed Forces rules state that a serviceman or woman can wear their uniforms voluntarily from their ‘residence to place of duty, irrespective of whether they travel by public or private transport, or on foot.’
EDIT: The article has a nice blurb about the difference between US and UK views of personnel in uniform.
However...
This level of power is why people just keep their head down and get through their lousy flight so they to their destination. Since air-travel, by its very nature, is monopolistic (until I get my damn flying car!) the airlines will do whatever they please until we all stop flying (won't happen) or other airlines gets started by entrepreneurs who're also sick and tired of this nonsense (won't say it can't happen, but highly unlikely).
At least if there were more choices, it would democratize air-travel. Alas, the recent merging of airlines just go to show, they have us at our weakest and will exercise any level of control they want in the name of safety. After all, nothing shows "Safety" like "Silence".
Would you care to name the single entity that has the monopoly in question?
(I do not think that word means what you think it means.)
... carry people (and not just cargo) and how many actually reach the most destinations? It's pretty much the early Hollywood Studio system up in the air. Sure, you can make a movie, but good luck getting known actors in it even if you could afford to pay them.
They are in a perfectly competitive environment which has driven industry profits extremely low which forces them to do everything as cheaply as possible.
The airline industry is the furthest you can be from a monopoly.
[added] of course there are other industries who are more commodity like real commodities, but air lines are the text book example (literally, not figuratively) for non-monopolistic competition. While the barriers appear high, they really aren't if you have the capital. If the airlines were profitable, almost anyone could get the capital to start one. In fact, upstart airlines appear consistently even though almost none of them make any money.
But that's a bit glib.
It's not actually that bad if your ambitions are not massive scale. There are any number of niche local airlines that have started with a couple of small/old leased planes even relatively recently. There are well established leasing mechanisms, and passenger planes have an extremely long expected lifetime but larger airlines are often under constant pressure to upgrade to bigger and more cost effective planes, and so there's a lot of supply.
In fact, there are websites where you can enquire about quotes for leasing full size passenger planes.
The other variant for that niche airline model is charter flights -- get a few hundred people from a city to go to Jamaica or something.
The delusion that some have that airlines represent "perfect competition" is amusing. It's an industry held up by direct subsidy, indirect subsidy via the Postal Service & military, and other bizarre compromises.
Back in the pre-Reagan era, regulation forced airlines to maintain specific prices and deliver a certain level of service (think Bell System type regulation). Deregulation brought low cost carriers like Southwest, but also allowed the traditional carriers to engage in a price war that ultimately put most of the industry out of business and brought much misery to the flying public.
The (in my long experience) most common reason given by gun-owning Americans for their need to be gun-owning Americans is that they have to be able to defend themselves against someone breaking into their house and wanting to kill them and their family.
Yet somehow, this is not a scenario that most Europeans feel any need to worry about.
I flew a lot as a child in the 80s, and every now and then I'd see someone kicked off a flight. It was usually for drunkedness, but my point is the right to remove a passenger at the airline employee's discretion has existed for decades. I know Seinfeld is fiction, but there's a pretty funny episode from 1995 where the pilot kicks seinfeld off a flight because seinfeld had kicked him out of his comedy show earlier that weekend.
Certainly there is neither a statute nor a regulation that says that polite disagreement is a general ground for removal from a flight. Millions of people are flying each week, and they may have a variety of opinions, but removing passengers is very rare. A few anecdotes here and there do not change the general statistics that plenty of people are flying. It's okay (as here) to ask a question. Maybe you will not be satisfied with the answer, but the flight can go on with you on board.
The article discusses several incidents where this seems to not be the case. Are you implying these incidents didn't happen?
The problem seems to be that no violation of any rule or statute is necessary for removal, it is entirely arbitrary and devoid of common sense at more than one level.
Now, should we initiate a behavior recall? Take the number of McDonalds-level staff in the air (A), multiply by the probable rate of power tripping (B), multiply by the average loss of tickets sold (C). A times B times C = X. If X is less than the cost of some basic decency training, we won't do any. Which airline do you work for? A major one.
Classic fascism at work here. These thugs think they can get away with anything after 9/11.