Yet another airline is currently caught in the middle of a PR nightmare as a result of a viral video that shows airline employees engaged in a verbal altercation with passengers.
On April 23, a California man named Brian Schear, his wife Brittany, and their two infants boarded a Delta Air Lines flight that was set to take off in Maui, Hawaii and land at Los Angeles International Airport. But according to a video that was captured by Schear’s wife, the Delta crew refused to take off and eventually asked Schear’s entire family to get off of the plane after Schear refused to remove his two-year-old son from a seat that he had purchased.
It seems Schear originally purchased the seat for his 18-year-old son Mason who ended up catching an earlier flight home. He claims he then spoke with a ticketing agent from Delta about switching the name on the ticket for the seat so that his younger son could use it. The ticketing agent reportedly told him that he would need to cancel the ticket and buy a new one with his younger son’s name on it before eventually telling him that he wouldn’t have to make the change and handing him a boarding pass with Mason’s name on it.
That led to problems once Schear and his family got on the flight. After seeing the discrepancy in the names, a Delta employee told Schear he would have to give up his young son’s seat and hold his son for the duration of the flight. Schear refused and told the employee his son wouldn’t be able to sleep on the flight if he wasn’t situated in a car seat. The employee told him he would be breaking a federal law by not removing his son from his seat, even though he had paid for it.
Schear continued to refuse to give up the seat, and eventually, he was told that he and his family would have to get off the plane. He then agreed to hold his son rather than inconvenience his family and other passengers on the flight, but another Delta employee told him staying on the plane was no longer an option. Schear and his wife eventually decided to take their two children and get off the plane rather than protest further, but they were clearly upset with the way things played out. And while Schear stayed levelheaded for the most part throughout the course of the video, he was very angry with how Delta handled the situation.
Schear and his family were forced to book a hotel room on their own after leaving the flight and caught a different plane the following day, which reportedly cost them an extra $2,000. Schear posted a video of the confrontation he had with Delta employees on YouTube on Wednesday. He also spoke with NBC4 about why he was so angry with what happened on the flight.
"What blew me away was when they said, if you don’t give the seat up, you’re going to jail," he said. "Your wife is going to jail, and they’re gonna take your kids away."
Delta released a statement to NBC4 on Wednesday and said they were "sorry for what this family experienced." The airline also promised to reach out to them "to better understand what happened and come to a resolution."
But Schear told NBC4 that wouldn’t be enough to get him to use Delta in the future.
"They need to change the way they treat us," he said. "They treat us like cattle. It’s unbelievable. It’s not fair to treat people this way. We’re the customers, we’re supposed to be treated with respect."
It has been a rough last month for the airline industry with regards to customer relations. A video surfaced in early April showing a United Airlines passenger being forcibly removed from a flight that was overbooked. Less than two weeks later, another video popped up online that showed an American Airlines flight attendant nearly getting into a physical altercation with a passenger after that passenger complained about the way the flight attendant treated a woman traveling with small children.
