Rude Passenger on Delta Flight Cites Stress As Trigger for Behavior

Defusing a tense situation involving customers can be pretty challenging. A flight attendant who managed to deal with a prickly circumstance involving a rude passenger on a Delta flight showed how a stern approach may be necessary with disruptive passengers who could not be reasoned with. 

When 19-year-old Marissa Rundell traveled with her eight-month-old baby on a flight from JFK to Syracuse, New York, little did she expect she would encounter a disruptive fellow passenger on the aircraft who not only cussed around her child but also threatened a flight attendant who mediated. The irate passenger ended up being thrown off the Delta flight, Daily Mail reported.

The past few years, headline-grabbing air travel incidents have occurred and gone viral. In several cases, passengers were off-loaded or bumped off their flights and while the muddied waters of responsibility come as no surprise to many, oftentimes airline companies cite technicalities or fine print in the contractual agreement.

In the case of the Delta Air Lines female passenger who got furiously angry and rude not only with a fellow passenger but with an airline employee, she cited stress as the cause of her behavior, which prompted the flight attendant to get her off the flight. While stress may, therefore, be regarded as the possible cause of the problem, it also resulted in stress to another inconvenienced, displeased passenger.

From a legal standpoint, airlines hold the power to deny someone boarding and to remove a person from a flight without resorting to unnecessary force. Several netizens who got wind of the situation that unfolded commended the airline employee who nipped the situation in the bud before it got out of hand.

Others who glossed over the obnoxious passenger's behavior commented that the flight attendant who was threatened of being fired had pushed her weight around. A handful believed that the irate passenger was dealt with in an unfair manner and should have been offered a seat elsewhere.

The Delta Air Lines incident underscored how air travel personnel need to correctly identify and deal with distressed passengers before they became too much of a problem, thereby preventing hassles for other passengers. It also cast attention to the need to have in place procedures and training of personnel in dealing with such problems or thorny situations.