SWA/AirTran Pax Incident In The News....
 

Booting 100 Jews? This is gonna take some 'Splainin...

Senior class trip takes huge detour when students are kicked off plane - CNN.com


(CNN) -- A New York high school senior class and an airline agree on one thing: 101 students and eight chaperones were kicked off an early-morning flight from New York to Atlanta on Monday.
From there, the accounts diverge.
Southwest Airlines said the group of "non-compliant passengers" would not stay seated, and some were using their mobile devices. When the students failed to comply with requests from the flight crew, including the captain, they were asked to leave the plane, delaying the AirTran flight for 45 minutes, said Southwest spokesman Brad Hawkins.
Southwest Airlines acquired AirTran in a deal announced three years ago.
Students and chaperones from Yeshivah of Flatbush, a private, Orthodox Jewish high school in Brooklyn, said the flight crew overreacted to the youths who were looking forward to visiting Six Flags and rafting, among other activities.
"It blew out of proportion. It was a mountain out of a molehill," said teacher Marian Wielgus, one of the chaperones.
According to Wielgus, some students may have had to be told twice to sit down or turn off their phones, but everyone listened.
"They certainly did not do what the stewardess was claiming they did," she said. "That's what was so bizarre."
Wielgus said the flight attendants were "nasty," "overreacting" and "created an incident when there didn't have to be one."
According to Southwest Airlines, the group violated safety regulations.
Wielgus said she would understand if individual students who were not complying had been asked to leave, but she objected to the collective punishment.
Wielgus said a "small group" of students in the back of the aircraft were chatty, but that did not warrant the flight crew to force an entire group of 109 people off the plane.
"It was so ugly," she said.
Rabbi Joseph Beyda, another chaperone, said none of the students on the plane was particularly loud or disruptive. And when he saw that the flight attendant was flustered and had asked students to leave, he asked which kids were causing issues and offered to help, but she refused.
"They just simply said 'get off the plane,'" Beyda said.
Student Jonathan Zehavi said he felt they were targeted because they are an identifiably Jewish group.
"They treated us like we were terrorists; I've never seen anything like it. I'm not someone to make these kinds of statements," Zehavi said. "I think if it was a group of non-religious kids, the air stewardess wouldn't have dared to kick them off."
Zehavi said Southwest Airlines is attempting to cover up an unprofessional and rash decision by saying their group was not cooperating with the crew, when in fact they were, he said.
"It was 4 o'clock in the morning. The last thing any of us wanted to do was get up and make a mess," Zehavi said.
Another student in the group, Michael Mamiye, said he was one of the first to be kicked off the plane. He said a flight attendant did not give him a chance to turn off his cell phone before asking him to "get off the plane."
The same flight attendant then told the captain that the students were "making trouble" and not turning off their phones. The captain didn't come out of the cockpit until the last second when he asked the group to leave, Mamiye said.
According to Mamiye, he and his classmates were quiet and sitting down as they were told. And when they were asked to leave, they left in a respectful and orderly fashion.
"We were more behaved than kids should be," he said.
Both Beyda and Mamiye said the airline's customer service did their best to accommodate the group by getting them on the next available flights. But the group had to be split up — some had connecting flights in Milwaukee — and they were in transit for a total of 12 hours, Mamiye said.

I'm sure they were kicked off because they were Jewish. :rolleyes:
When you want a law suit/attention just throw out the race, religion, sexism card and hope it sticks.

Aaaaah, nothing like the smell of a great, big old lawsuit!

But it is going to be hard to explain why EVERYBODY had to get off.

Well, let's see. Group of kids traveling with chaperones. If you throw some of the kids off, then some chaperones have to go too. Remember, the chaperones are legally responsible for the kids. If some of the chaperones get off, then can the remaining adults control the remaining kids? Seems with a full complement of adults, they weren't doing a good enough job as it was.

Chuck em all off and sort it out later. Sounds like the plan of least resistance.

If they kicked off one or a few students, and then the chaperones all decided to go (and take all the other kids of course) then it should be a non-event.

Article (could be wrong) sounds like they just booted the whole group.

One element of this is a great example of a growing pain as SWA becomes more legacy by the second.

Their quick turn mentality is ingrained into the fabric of their existance and part of that is giving massive authority to their FA's to be Drill Instructor-esque rulers of the cabin when it comes to pax compliance so they can get on their way. They're friendly and fun and tell jokes and do stand up comedy PA's and all that but you do not want to cost them an extra second on a turn or you will pay. They crack heads and the company backs them and the plan pushed out on time and they save a minute of block times a million flights a day every day = competitive productivity advantage.

Which is also why they taxi at takeoff power, beg for shortcuts in those rare instances when they don't get them anyway and bribe ATC to give them flagrant and highly illegal Most Favored Airline status as they're cleared out of sequence first out of a hold or someone else has to do a 270 so they can cut in from behind them to be number one for the numbers so they're 23 minutes early instead of only 22 minutes early.

But now they're growing up and becoming a big boy airline with big boy realities. Their secondary airport core business model is quietly being killed off because its outdated and ineffective. Their planes are getting bigger, their ops more complex, their turn times longer, their costs much, much higher and their competition far more dangerous.

But culture dies hard. Big group...non compliant for 2 minutes...kick em all off...power turn complete. Yeah, that dog don't hunt here no more. Welcome to the bigs.

How long, in your expert opinion, should they wait for customer to comply with BASIC instructions? If they all speak English there shouldn't be a need to repeat SIMPLE instructions more than twice.

Sounds like one of my TLV flights. Nothing to do with being Jewish just New Yorkers with an attitude , kids just do it better than the parents. FA's most likely didnt get nasty enough as its the only thing they understand.

Ahem, I'm a native NY'er AND a have been a FA for 2 different airlines and even though it's a tough crowd, PLEASE don't lump us all into the "rude" category. :)