So, get this. A flight was taxiing out to take off from DFW when one of the people on board started ranting on about the plane crashing in a way that everyone else on board could hear. Indeed the person repeatedly said ‘Captain, I can’t be responsible for crashing this plane’.
Passengers and flight crew tried to subdue and restrain this person, who resisted so vigorously that one of the flight attendants suffered injuries. The pilot aborted the take-off and returned the plane to the gate, where police boarded and took the offending person off in hand-cuffs.
So – guess what happened to this unruly person? Were they then locked up for hours, and were all the other people on board the plane treated as co-conspirators, with the plane being emptied, searched, and all passengers having to be rescreened? Are federal charges now being pressed against this person?
Or, for that matter, did Federal Air Marshals shoot the person in the back?
Actually, none of this happened. Why not, you might wonder?
Because the person creating the ruckus was, ooops – a female flight attendant. Both the FBI and the airport police say they do not plan to charge the attendant with any crime. Instead she has been sent to hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.
The Flight Attendants Union, usually the first to call for draconian penalties against any passenger failing to submit to any and all commands and insults from their members, explained, in a statement, that this was an ‘unfortunate but non-violent confrontation involving a flight attendant aboard an aircraft preparing for takeoff’. Unfortunate – definitely. Non-violent? That’s not what another of their members (the one injured in the struggle to control the crazy woman flight attendant) might feel.
It is fair to say that anyone who acts this way is of course crazy. But it is also fair to say that if the person is a crazy passenger, they’ll be up on federal charges (or shot in the back by Federal Air Marshals as happened once before).
Why aren’t the same standards applied to flight attendants? Or is it alright for flight attendants to go crazy?
You’d have thought they’d be held to a higher standard, not a lesser standard, than us as passengers.
