Viral Video of Child’s Transatlantic Tantrum Creates Controversy

Frankfurt Main, Germany - July 10, 2015: Airbus A380-800 aircraft of the Lufthansa airline landing at the international airport in Frankfurt Main (FRA) (Photo: iStock)

Cellphone footage of a child’s outrageous behavior throughout a flight from Germany to the U.S. has earned sympathy for passengers who endured the journey, but all may not be as it seems.

It’s generally assumed that passengers are exaggerating ever so slightly when they complain that a baby cried for the “whole flight” or that a child kicked their seatback for the entire flight, but in the case of passengers on a Lufthansa flight from Germany to Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) in August, it seems there was very little need to embellish the tale. One flyer on the transatlantic trip even documented the nightmare flight and posted a time-lapsed video of the ordeal on YouTube.

The footage appears to show a toddler climbing on top of seatbacks prior to takeoff. Later, the child can be seen running up and down the aisle of the aircraft, but it is the small child’s relentless “demonic screams” that have other passengers visible in the video covering their ears and looking on helplessly. The heavily edited footage certainly makes it appear that the screaming started before takeoff and continued non-stop until the flight reached the gate at EWR.

“Demonic child screams and runs through an 8 hour flight,” Shane Townley, who published the video last summer, writes. “Watch as this kid runs and screams throughout the entire flight while the mother does little to nothing to stop him. 3 years old on a 8 hour flight from Germany to Newark NJ. He never quits!’

While the mother featured in the 5-minute-long viral video has drawn more than her fair share of criticism for failing to control her disruptive child, it was recently revealed that the toddler suffers from an undisclosed medical issue that may have contributed to the unruly display. Citing an unnamed source, the Daily Mail reported this week that the child “suffers from a disability that affects his behavior.”

Though the fact that the toddler has health problems might not make the memory of eight hours of torture any easier to stomach, it might help put the experience into perspective. An uncomfortable transatlantic flight starts to sound like a breeze when compared to a lifetime of dealing with severe behavioral problems.

A Lufthansa spokesperson told the newspaper that passengers on the flight were “quite understanding of the situation at hand’ for the most part. “Our crew worked around-the-clock to de-escalate the situation, tend to all passengers and assist the mother,” the airline said in a statement.

[Photo: Shutterstock]