This immediately reminded me of a brilliant Ricky Gervais joke in which the airline doesn't hand out nuts because one of the passengers having a deadly nut allergy, which makes Ricky contemplate over rubbing peanut butter all over his body prior to his next flight or always bring his own bag of nuts with him ... unfortunately couldn't find a clip now on this, but came across another great piece from
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In any case: The guy should have stopped eating the nuts when the cabin crew told him so, and they should have simply taken the nuts away after he didn't comply. If a life was actually in danger, drastic measures ought to be made. In other cases, e.g. violent people are tied to their seats, so why can't they just take away a bag of nuts from someone? Which kinda makes me wonder if this story was really that bad ... or just a typical Daily Mail "improvement" of nothing. One should assume any airline crew is rather well trained and experienced when it comes to assessing emergency or unusual situations and subsequently finding the right, perhaps even unusual measures on how to respond to the situation. Maybe it was "just" an anxiety shock - surely terrible for the child and her mom - but maybe less dramatic to objective observers such as the crew and thus no need to take away the nuts or divert to the nearest airport. Who really knows? Surely not the Daily Mail.
Worst case: it was/could have been a terrible mismanagement of the situation by the crew, incl. non-compliance of instructions by the nut guy, which could actually require an investigation.
Another thing that immediately came to mind was the mantra-like info campaigns throughout the past two years on how great all the airline HEPA filters are that keep the air on a plane essentially clean, germ-free, semi-sterilised, at least better and cleaner than anywhere else ... but if someone eats nuts a good 10 meters ahead of me, I can die because of the dust??? If it was inside a nut-packing factory, alright. I get it. But on a plane with airfilters? Just something really doesn't add up in this story. But then again it's the daily mail ... paired with people who want to make a few quid out of their tragic story by selling it to a more than questionable newspaper (who actually does that??) .... you are better off watching Ricky Gervais and Louis CK.