susanc

BNA SW calls police to have stranded passengers removed or arrested.


Sorry, I don't know how to just post the video.

halls120

Nothing like good old Southern Hospitality.

ZonaFlyer

Cops are gonna cop. Their flight may have been cancelled, not their ticket. When you hold a monopoly on use of force, intimidation is sure to follow.

Joshua

This is not great P.R. for WN and also is not the right way to do crowd control at a connecting airport. The airport authority should be figuring out how to do proper crowd control and have people standing in line in the right places.

The Southwest staff at the local airport are provably stretched very thin and aren’t able to coordinate with the local airport authority. The local airport needs to step up. They’re getting $4.50 in PFCs from every person who is stuck standing around. Send out someone in charge to communicate with passengers, not police with orders to trespass passengers.

Joshua

Indeed - I was ready to argue the specifics of what a “ticket” and a “reservation” are per IATA terms. These passengers certainly have a ticket. And TSA lets you through with a boarding pass for a cancelled flight. Often that’s the only place to find customer service at smaller stations (thinking of a 4+ hour delay at CHO from CHO-IAD a few years ago).

susanc

Never have I ever been told to leave the secured area when I have had a flight cancelled.

twitch76

Indeed, the optics are bad, and the threat to trespass these pax seems over the top.

Also I don't know the current specifics on the ground at BNA.

And I suspect that WN's communication has been non-existent, self-contradictory, and frustrating.

But I'll be the contrarian and offer my controversial and highly opinionated take anyway...

With this many flights canceled and pax having been told that it will be 3, 4, or 5 days until you can be rescheduled, at some point it makes sense to move passengers out of the secured area. There at at least 8 Hilton-branded airport hotels with reasonable room rates available for tonight. Airports are not staffed in such a manner as to handle thousands of stranded passengers for extended overnight stays. Those pax had a valid ticket/boarding pass when they entered TSA. They no longer have such a document, and their best hope of getting one is at the main ticket counter, not at a random gate agent's counter that's trying to get another flight out the door.

Additionally, as is often the case with these videos, we don't know what happened prior to the threat to trespass them. I felt that the cop was fairly calm and attempted to diffuse the situation while getting them out of the way of airport ops.

chrisl137

They all still hold valid tickets. The tickets just aren't connected to flights anymore. Given WN's inability to communicate anything at this point, or do things like get them to hotels, they should be lining up in front of the cop to file criminal fraud complaints against WN. And with most airlines, gate agents have as much or more capability to change flights as an agent at the front counter.

Fingolfin269

It might make sense to move people but this isn’t the way. It’s pretty clear early on that he had no idea what was going on and just came rushing in to tell everyone to leave regardless of whether they had canceled flights or not. I’m also not a fan of the tone. Why the condescension instead of compassion? Stop treating every encounter like it’s a threat which basically just increases tension. These folks are not the root of the problem. They’re just trying to get answers.

Orange County Commuter

One of those people needs to call the local news station in Nashville. They’ll love this.

boss315

exactly why I hate living in this god forsaken state...but have no choice!

DenverBrian

What airport ops?!? Are they blocking someone from emptying the trash?!?

twitch76

Based on the dialogue, it appeared to me that they were at a gate counter, unrelated to their flight/destination. We can’t see what preceded this, but consider the possibility that they had already been repeatedly asked to move away from the counter so a gate agent could get specific pax processed in order to get a specific flight off the ground. With scattered reports of front line staff being sworn at, slapped, and spit on, there’s at least a possibility that there’s more to the story than the video tells.

Also, we have no idea what intercom announcements may have preceded this event. I watched video of one airport where people in a line (probably 200+ deep) were told that if their flight had been canceled they needed to leave because they could not be rebooked for multiple days.

(And before someone misquotes me, I am neither blaming these pax, nor accusing them of anything. I’m simply saying that there may be more to the story. Additionally, Airport Police and TSA have every right to clear the secured area of people who do not hold a valid boarding pass.)

Orange County Commuter

Actually I figured it's SWs new plan..... if the Nashville jail arrests these passengers than they have food and lodging.

Sorry but there's NO reason this is acceptable unless the employees were being threatened and the officer doesn't seem to indicate that's going on.

twitch76

You don’t have to be sorry, We just disagree.

What recourse does a gate agent have if someone refuses to leave their counter after the gate agent has determined they can’t help them? How does a gate agent triage the mass of people in front of them when some of them CAN be helped? What do you do if a crowd of people refuse to disperse after you’ve told them that you’re *only* processing pax going to MCI right now?

I don’t know that ANY of these things had happened. But they’re all plausible situations where asking for support from law enforcement might be reasonable. Again, I’ll repeat what I said in my prior post: the optics are bad and the threat of trespassing them seems over the top. But none of us were there to see it unfold.