|
?:reviewBody
|
-
In mid-November 2009, a brief Associated Press news account reported an incident that had taken place on an AirTran Airways flight from Atlanta to Houston, one which resulted in the plane's returning to the gate and departing 21⁄2 hours late due to a passenger who would not shut off his cell phone when so directed by a flight attendant. A fuller article published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who interviewed a woman seated directly behind the passenger in question, provided more detail: The passenger with the cell phone was part of a larger group (eleven others, plus an interpreter) seated throughout the plane; the passenger and the interpreter were asked to step off the plane (the other eleven members of the group also left the plane, although they eventually reboarded the same flight, while the passenger and the interpreter took a later flight); twelve other passengers also took up the airline's offer to allow them to leave the plane and take a different flight; and a new crew eventually manned the flight when it finally departed. An AirTran spokesman said the issue was a simple matter of a passenger who would not turn off his cell phone when directed (a situation complicated by the passenger's inability to speak English), requiring the flight to return to the gate: Although the incident was reported to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said it would not follow up, as it was a customer service issue and not a security issue: The woman on the flight who was interviewed by the Journal-Constitution maintained that the passenger in question had a camera, not a cell phone, and that the incident was merely one of confusion involving a non-English speaking passenger which was blown out of proportion due to poor communication: Shortly after these events, a widely circulated account of the incident appeared on the Internet from Todd Petruna, who maintained that he was a passenger on the referenced flight and that what really took place was quite different than what was reported in the news. According to Petruna, Muslim passengers on the flight were potential terrorists who were making a dry run at hijacking an airliner: In anther account, a chaplain who was originally slated to fly on Flight 297 (but had arrived late and missed the initial boarding) reported that another passenger who left the plane before its eventual take-off told him that, as stated in Todd Petruna's message, the incident involved more than the single passenger mentioned by AirTran representatives and news reports: However, none of the news accounts of the Flight 297 incident mentioned members of a passenger group screaming insults at the flight crew or being bodily ejected from the plane by other passengers. On 4 December 2009, AirTran issued a point-by-point rebuttal of the original account, maintaining (among other statements) that the members of the group in question were dressed just like other passengers (rather than in Muslim attire), that there were no reports of their screaming insults at crew members, that there were no reports of any of them standing up in a threatening manner, that there were no physical altercations between any passengers, that the group's bags were not removed from the plane, that none of the group members was determined to pose a security threat, that there was no TSA agent on the plane, and that no passenger was refused permission to get off the plane: AirTran also issued a statement maintaining that Todd Petruna not actually a passenger on Flight 297: According to a Marietta Daily Journal reporter and Houston station KHOU-TV, the e-mail's author acknowledged he had embellished his account but maintained that he was in fact on the flight: Another Flight 297 passenger interviewed in a video made available by Atlanta television station WSB stated that although he did see a number of Middle Eastern passengers on the flight walking around, interacting with each other, and being uncooperative with the flight crew, and although he felt AirTran mishandled the incident (primarily by not communicating information about the situation to other passengers), none of the group in question was dancing, singing, taking pictures, or ended up being manhandled off the airplane by other passengers. He also stated that he talked to the pilots on the replacement crew, who reported they felt perfectly safe in flying the plane, and that he thought the claim the group of Middle Easterners were potential hijackers or terrorists to be far-fetched. Contrary to common belief, the fact that a replacement crew was used to complete the flight is not an indicator that the original flight crew refused to continue or felt the situation to be unsafe. When flights experience substantial delays in taking off, as Flight 297 did that day, that situation sometimes requires that the original crew be replaced because otherwise they would time out and exceed FAA limitations on maximum hours per working period.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}