canopus27

Ellen Flemming talks about an alleged conflict with an Air Canada flight attendant over garbage at her seat on a flight from Kelowna to Saint John, N.B. Air Canada claims the woman 'exhibited aggressive behaviour' and allegedly 'kicked a crew member.'

https://globalnews.ca/news/4533114/a...r-dispute/amp/

canopus27

I'm generally pretty sceptical about passengers who claim to have been treated badly by AC .... but there's something that rings true about this story.

The passenger (a 71 year old woman) found some garbage in the seatback (seems very likely), and after the FA refused to deal with it she placed it on the cart when it next came by.

She claims that she thought the cart would have a garbage container on it (hard to say if this part is true, but it's not unrealistic for a 71 year old infrequent flyer to think that) ... and so she put the garbage on the cart. It all went south from there.

The FA blew up, the plane turned around ... and just to double down, the reaction and claims of AC corporate security strike me as extreme and unproven....

As I said, this story has a ring of truth to it.

smallmj

Bad passenger or power tripping FA? Some of both?

We never get the whole story in these situations, though the third party witness certainly helps.

mapleg

Some people manage to make mountains out of molehills. Ok, there was some garbage in the seat back. Got it. FA does sound like a goof but all she had to is ask is there a place where I can put this garbage someone has left behind?

vernonc

Power tripping. The passenger has a witness and Gabor - so this goes to court and AC settles is my prediction. How does it even get to this ?

vernonc

Watch the videos (plural). She did ask the FA to take the garbage and he refused because he is a FA and not a garbage collector. Both the passenger and witness reported the same thing.
I would guess they wanted to talk to her to get her to apologize - since she refused to communicate with them, they turned the plane around. A frail grandmother getting a plane turned around because she was a risk to the safety and security of the plane/crew/pax over garbage cleanup. C'mon. This is going to get tossed in AC's lap soon as its hits a court.
My recent service on AC has been very good and vastly improved over days gone by but there are still the odd FA's that are in the wrong profession. While I have complained about stuff like food on AC, the service has been good with some SDs being awesome.

jazzsax

I wonder if Gabor asks for a cut of any compensation? Would seem like a big racket to me!

canadiancow

So in AC's eyes, she caused a diversion, and there's no ban from flying?

smallmj

Perhaps they reviewed the situation afterwards and decided that the diversion was completely unnecessary so a ban is not needed. We'll probably never have complete information. We'll also likely never know if the FA was disciplined in any way.

MSPeconomist

WaytoomuchEurope

This.

How does the pilot defend this decision? I cannot think of a version of the story the FA could spin that would make a diversion even remotely necessary.

AC execs are going to blow a top over the cost of this.

rankourabu

Hopefully grandma gets a nice chunk of money for this

vernonc

I assume/believe that the std SOP is the pilot diverts or lands if the crew reports a safety or security issue. If the FA and SD told the pilot that they did not feel safe or were assaulted the pilot would have to do this. And the pilot will let the ground crew and AC corp deal with the fallout.
Same thing on the ground as seem on this forum multiple times where any time a crew member reports a passenger, the pilot offloads them and let someone else deal with the passenger and the AC corp can deal with the crew if required.

vernonc

Kind of weird that AC security would say the grandma caused the diversion and kicked the crew, but there is no further ban. She could not fly on AC on another flight and had to buy Westjet so she was probably temporarily banned till AC security reviewed.
Unless AC can trot out some other witnesses, this passenger and the witness will result in AC losing this in court. This will get settled quickly.

tcook052

Compounded by the incalculable amount in bad PR as articles such as this may cost.Cooler heads should've prevailed and how such a seemingly small matter go so blown out of proportion should be a big learning lesson for AC.

Having an independent eyewitness corroborate the passenger's version of events is huge as that's rare in these he said, she said types of encounters.