‘Tis the season for travel chaos and epic airport meltdowns. A long delay on the tarmac at Newark Liberty International Airport sent one passenger into an F-bomb- and C-bomb-laden fury, some of it directed at a Black airline attendant, and it wasn’t even officially the holidays.
A video taken on Nov. 10 has been circulating online, amassing half a million views, just as the year’s busiest travel season is upon us. It’s striking a chord with literally everyone who has encountered an entitled, angry passenger, whether as an airline employee or a fellow passenger.
“This woman went absolutely nuts on my flight, and we had to return to the gate to remove her,” read the caption on the viral TikTok video.
The United Airlines passenger can be seen taking her frustration out on a Black flight attendant, and calling her the C-word for no apparent reason, before freezing like a deer in the headlights when she noticed someone across the aisle was filming her.
@haleyrose99 This woman went absolutely nuts on my flight & we had to return back to the gate to remove her. #govshutdown #newarkairport ♬ original sound – HaleyRose99
The woman who posted the video, HaleyRose99, detailed the passenger’s wild antics on the Newark-to-Charleston flight in a follow-up video. “Buckle up,” she began. “This was truly one of the wildest travel experiences I’ve ever had.”
Granted, the flight was delayed by at least three hours, and as it was finally taxiing to the runway, the pilot announced another hour-and-a-half delay.
“At this point, everyone is just over it, and you can feel the collective exhaustion,” HaleyRose99 explained, but one woman screaming the C-word stunned the cabin into silence.
The woman sitting next to her pleaded, “Ma’am, can you please chill?” According to Haley, “That was just not the right thing to say to her, because she just completely loses it.”
After the passenger told that woman to “unalive herself,” the flight attendants stepped in and moved everyone sitting next to her, and that’s when “she started spiraling,” said Haley. The quick-thinking crew then had the “biggest guys on the flight” flank the passenger on each side before she was eventually escorted off the plane.
Flight attendants, like the one in the video, often bear the brunt of bad behavior by passengers, and the vast majority of those workers — nearly 80 percent — are women, with about half being women of color. Many flight attendants have more than one flight in a day and are surprisingly not paid for long ground delays or even the time before takeoff — the clock starts when the airplane’s doors close.
The United Airlines union, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, is currently negotiating for raises and improvements in quality of life. But there’s no word on hazard pay or bonuses for dealing with obnoxious passengers.
Great Job Grace Jidoun & the Team @ Atlanta Black Star Source link for sharing this story.
