Kelsey Bolar (Harkness), a senior analyst for Independent Women’s Forum, put it best in a tweet on Monday: “Good job, Spirit Airlines, kicking a pregnant mom, a 2-year-old, and a child with special needs off your flight. Upholding your reputation as the trashiest airline, at least!”
Spirit Airlines initially claimed the reason the family with two young children (and a pregnant mom) was removed from the flight was that the adults refused to wear their masks. But by now social media are jam-packed with videos showing explicitly how both mom and dad were wearing facemasks. So, not a good PR response to start.
Which is to say that the story is already a public relations nightmare for America’s ultra-low-cost carrier: on Monday, a Spirit Airlines flight attendant confronted a family on-board a plane scheduled to fly from Orlando to New York because their 2-year-old child was not wearing a mask while she was eating. And they had their special-needs boy with them. And on top of all that, as can be seen in the videos from that preposterous story, the father was wearing a yarmulke, on the week of Yom HaShoah.
Breaking911 was first out with the story on Twitter, we believe, with the two videos that shocked social media Monday night. Enjoy…
More from the flight. pic.twitter.com/PMq2nArVWz
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911)
The little girl was sitting on her mother’s lap eating yogurt, when the female flight attendant told them, on behalf of her colleague, a male flight attendant, who wanted them off the plane.
“What did we do?” the father asked the female flight attendant, who responded that they were being asked to leave the plane because of their “noncompliance with the masks,” and the father said, “We’re wearing a mask,” which they were, as can clearly be seen in the video.
But the flight attendant said, pointing to the girl who was eating: “She’s not wearing a mask.” Indeed, the little girl has yet to master the art of eating yogurt with her facemask on.
According to the father, “a lady over here heard someone on the phone before we even got on the phone that they were planning this,” and even though “the captain was OK with it, the whole plane was OK with it,” across the aisle sat this “one African American that was not OK with this.”
The male flight attendant then forced all the passengers to deplane and called the police. In a later video, the same male flight attendant is himself being escorted off the plane by police, and everyone else is asked to return to their seats – having been waiting out in the company hangar.
But a representative for Spirit told the Washington Examiner that there was a crew change after the passengers had been ordered to leave the plane, but it had nothing to do with the facemask incident. Because that’s the normal protocol for a crew change: you make all the passengers get off the plane, then you call in the cops to march the old crew out, and the new crew boards the flight.
Happy ending for the family kicked off Spirit Airlines! Everyone got back on they kicked the flight attendant off instead ? pic.twitter.com/Te2G6W04GZ
— suzy (@suzy__1776)
Andrea Widburg wrote Tuesday morning in American Thinker (For once, in an airline mask story, the right person got punished): “There’s a definite theme here of obviously Jewish passengers running into trouble with airline attendants. There’s one other twist to this story of the family kicked off the plane on Monday. In the second video, above, the father notes explicitly that the push for them to leave came from a Black woman. At the very least, this reflects ongoing tensions between Blacks and Jews. Blacks are second only to Muslims in America when it comes to anti-Semitism.”
Spirit Airlines released a statement on Monday saying, “We’re aware of incorrect information circulating about Spirit Airlines Flight 138 from Orlando to Atlantic City. The flight was delayed due to adults who did not comply with the federal mask requirement. We allowed the Guests to continue on the flight to their destination after assurances of compliance.”
And by now you and us know that the entire statement just above is something you don’t want to step into after watching the bulls go by.
