ICYMI, it has not been a stellar past few weeks for air travel, *cough* namely for United Airlines – but United is now not the only airline making headlines for the way customers are being treated.
A video depicting a mother crying after allegedly being hit on the head with her stroller by an American Airlines flight attendant is going viral after another passenger on AA Flight 591 from San Francisco to Dallas-Ft. Worth filmed the incident. Posting it to Facebook, the passenger, Surain Adyanthaya, captioned the video, “OMG! AA Flight attendant violently took a stroller from a lady with her baby on my flight, hitting her and just missing the baby. Then he tried to fight a passenger who stood up for her.”
American Airlines attendant ‘struck mum with her baby buggy’ before picking fight with man defending her @AmericanAir pic.twitter.com/ewE3qFO9zo
— Jenna Abrams (@Jenn_Abrams) April 22, 2017
According to ABC News, the conflict resulted from the flight attendant yelling at the woman for attempting to store her stroller in the plane’s overhead bin. The video also shows another male passenger coming to the woman’s defense, saying to the visibly heated flight attendant, “Hey bud, hey bud, you do that to me and I’ll knock you flat.”
On the bright side, American Airlines was quick to react to the incident. 20 minutes after the plane landed in Dallas, the airline issued a statement to the Washington Post, saying that the flight attendant had been grounded until further notice, and that the mother and her two children traveling with her had been upgraded to first class.
“We are deeply sorry for the pain we have caused this passenger and her family and to any other customers affected by the incident,” Leslie Scott, a representative from American, told the Post. “We are making sure all of her family’s needs are being met while she is in our care.”
While incidents like these shouldn’t be happening to begin with, United might at least want to take note from American of the proper way to handle these situations when they do occur.