Ahh, the jetBlue incident.  The moment that many have fantasized about for years.  A flight attendent delivering a resounding “fuck you” to obstinate and rude passengers somehow strikes a chord in many of us. 

As you can imagine, I’ve had a lot of people privately make comments and ask questions about this over the past 2 days. 

It’s your fault.  The customer, that is.  I’ve long said that there is something odd that happens to people when they get on an airliner.  They just go weird and often do things they would never consider doing anywhere else in their lives.  For instance, would you ordinarily choose to have sex in your dirty bathroom?  Would you ordinarily get so liquored up that you would urinate on the restaurant floor?  Would you argue with subway driver who asked you to sit down  for your safety?

Paying a few hundred dollars to fly from point A to point B really does not grant you an exemption from behaving appropriately in public.   It doesn’t grant you an exception from safety rules and it doesn’t offer you an opportunity to behave like a completely rude jerk just because you feel like it.  When you’re on an aircraft, you are traveling in the public and when a flight attendant asks you to sit down and refrain from grabbing your luggage, be a good boy or girl and just do it.  Contrary to what you think, standing up and grabbing your suitcase so you can rush to the front of the line to exit the aircraft is *not* going to improve your day so much that you just can’t stop yourself. 

Before anyone points a finger at the real problem being leisure travelers or infrequent travelers, I strongly disagree.  I’ve seen plenty of frequent fliers behave just as bad as anyone else.  Remember the woman who decided that she was treated poorly on Southwest Airlines because she was denied a seat on aircraft in favor of seating an overweight child?  She was on standby.  She didn’t have a confirmed seat and it doesn’t matter if the kid was overweight or not.  It lacked class to contact media and act as if she was horribly wronged by the airline.  She wasn’t.  She was being petulant and acting entitled to far greater treatment than she deserved or had paid for. 

It’s your fault.  You, the airline, have caused this.  You have spent the last 80 years teaching the public that they’re always right on your aircraft that *your* airline owns.  You’ve condemned your staff over and over again in favor of someone who spent $200 one time to travel on your airplane and your staff knows just where the line is.  Sadly, that line offers only a small amount of uncomfortable manuevering space. 

The truth is, the customer isn’t always right.  That comes from someone who has spent most of his career in service industries.  The customer is quite capable of being wrong and making that person who chooses to be obnoxiously wrong in charge of your staff’s career isn’t the way to properly run a business.  You have a right to say “this customer broke our rules, behaved boorishly and conducted themselves in a manner which would get them banned from a restaurant so we ban them from our airline.” 

You really do.  I wouldn’t use that power lightly, mind you, but it’s time to re-set some expectations for your customers.  One of those expectations is that $200 is not purchasing them the right to ignore airline regulations, FAA rules or the right to abuse your staff. 

It’s not entirely surprising that the jetBlue flight attendant kind of lost it.  Do I think he’s a hero?  Absolutely not.  Do I think he’s a horrible person?  Absolutely not.  Sadly, he’s most likely a person working a hard job (not unlike most of us) who simply allowed his anger to reach a point that he chose to do something terribly foolish and unprofessional.   He’s neither an absolute sinner nor an absolute saint.  He’s a human being who clearly made a bad mistake. 

Not unlike the many people who do one really stupid thing on aircraft as customers almost every week.

Most telling of all is that I’ve yet to have seen anyone condemn an extremely rude and disruptive passenger for their part in this.

Filed under: Airline News, Airline Service by ajax