I’m blaming society for this one.
One hundred students from a Brooklyn-area school were thrown off an Airtran flight after they refused to turn off their cell phones and sit their asses down.
Which means two things:
1. These kids have no manners/can’t follow rules.
2. A cell phone is more important than their safety.
OK, they might not be bad kids, but here’s an account of what actually happened:
The high school seniors, all from the Yeshiva of Flatbush in Brooklyn, ignored multiple requests from flight attendents and, eventually, the captain to take their seats and power down their electronics. After the captain’s request went unheeded, the students, and their adult chaperones, were ordered to leave the plane for safety reasons, delaying the flight for over 45 minutes, according to Brad Hawkins, a spokesman for Southwest Airlines, AirTran’s parent company.
“I have no indication that the flight attendants overreacted,” Hawkins told the Associated Press. “The point at which the captain comes on the PA system and says, ‘You all need to sit down’ is unusual.”
One witness told CNN that there were roughly 10 students in the back of the plane who repeatedly disobeyed the crew. “They were laughing at them and ignoring them,” passenger Brad Rinschler said. “The pilot warned them. They did not comply. They thought it was a joke.”
“I’ve never seen this,” Rinschler added, noting that he takes the flight three times a month. “If they were adults, they wouldn’t have even had that many chances.”
And of course, the school is not happy about AirTrain’s allegations so they’ve decided to launch their own investigation, insisting that the in-flight crew was out of place and wrong.
“We take this matter seriously and have started our own investigation,” said a statement released Tuesday by Rabbi Seth Linfield, executive director of the Yeshiva of Flatbush school. “Preliminarily, it does not appear that the action taken by the flight crew was justified.”
And this is what one student had to say about the “unfair” treatment:
“They treated us like we were terrorists; I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m not someone to make these kinds of statements,” student Jonathan Zehavi told CNN. “I think if it was a group of non-religious kids, the air stewardess wouldn’t have dared to kick them off.”
Hmmm … Do you think they were targeted for their religion, or because they were just being defiant teenagers? Discuss!
SOURCE: Gawker
