FOX Sports Personality Clay Travis: Delta Barred My Entire Family Over Head Lice Fears

Travis writes that his family was told they would not be allowed to board their connecting flight home after his nine-year-old developed tell-tale signs of lice during a recent trip from Paris.

FOX Sports commentator Clay Travis was one of the few media voices who defended United Airlines following the public outcry over the treatment of physician David Dao who was violently removed from an overbooked and now-infamous Flight 3411 prior to departure at Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD). Now, after a tangle of his own with Delta Airlines, the television personality has a bone to pick over yet another questionable decision by a legacy carrier.

Travis writes about his family’s ordeal following a Delta Airlines flight form Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG) to Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport (MSP) in an Out Kick the Coverage column this week.  According to the sports analyst and radio show host, the trouble started when his nine-year-old son started to scratch his head during the trip across the Atlantic. Travis writes that he was stunned at how the crew reacted to the surprise discovery that his young child was showing signs of having head lice.

Travis says his entire family was ordered to remain quarantined on the plane after the flight landed at MSP. In his account of the incident, Travis claims that his children were then subjected to an uninvited medical exam after all of the other passengers had deplaned. To make matters worse, the family was then allegedly instructed by a flight attendant to leave the airport and not attempt to board their flight home.

“We return to wait in line, eventually make it through customs — we did not have to declare the lice — and as soon as we enter the airport Nurse Ratched is standing there with another Delta employee,” Travis writes in his OKC piece. “This man tells us that we will not be allowed to take our connecting flight home, that we must leave the airport immediately, find somewhere in the city to be treated for lice, obtain a clearance form that proves we had all been treated, and until we do that we will not be allowed to fly home on Delta.”

Interestingly, controversial pundit Ann Coulter similarly referred to a Delta Airlines flight attendant as “Nurse Ratchets” during an often hostile back-and-forth with the airline on social media over an unrelated matter. In this case, the airline admonished the provocative television personality on Twitter that “your insults about our customers and employees are unacceptable and unnecessary.”

Although the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommends that children who are found to have lice should not be isolated or even sent home from school (as Travis points out), the prospect of being seat mates with a lice-infested child is still likely to give most passengers and crew members pause – even if the CDC says there is nothing to worry about. While the well-known sports personality doesn’t dispute the unpleasantness of the airline’s predicament, he lays out a somewhat compelling case that Delta employees seem to have both overreacted and over-stepped their authority.