spin88

My focus is not if the girl was a theat (no there is absolutely no arguement that she was). My focus is on if the mom made a threat. If she did then, its different. A threat is (1) what was said, and (2) the context in which it is said, and (3) the tone and inflection with which it is said. If I say to my friend, "hey man, I'm gonna kill you" He will immediately see from my tone its not a threat. If some crazy person calls the cops, the cops show up and quickly figure out a crazy person called them, no threat. If some biker in Wako says "I'm gonna kill you" well different story.

There are two options, mom made what could legitimately be considered a "threat" by a reasonable person, or no such threat was made. What about 3/4 of the posters on this thead say mom said "scratch someone" is NOT what the mom put on her FB post, and not what media reports which quote her as saying its just wrong. Other posters have wrongly claimed the girl actually scratched someone. None of this happened.

I think you agree with me that what the mom said could be, or could not be constured as a threat. I think you would also agree with me what nothing she said was a per se threat. So context/inflection matters.

Mustering the evidence, UA put her on a DL flight, police and parametics were just going to leave her on the flight. Pilot demanded she be removed. That says that once they landed and someone who did not cause the plane to devert looked at the situation, they realized it was never a situation. Hindsight is 20/20.

But at the time, was it reasonable to view a threat as having been made? This is why I keep coming back to that fact that everyone who heard/saw what happened thought the FA badly overreacted, there was no threat.

A bunch of people claimed there were witnesses to back up the FA, these folks have now gone radio silent, there are no witness to back up the FA, and at least 5 (one who reports several others) who back the mom.

In this context it is the FA vs. the mom + 5-6 witnesses. I give the edge to the 6, not the one, particular given the well documented propensity for certain FAs to go all power mad.

I basically agree with you (particularly the bolded part) although I reach a different conclusion, basically on the weight of the evidence (its at least 5 witness with no ax to grind vs. the FA).. I also think that UAs PR department will have reached out to passengers if they thought it would help them, this has become a PR storm, and it is not making UA look good. Trust me, if UA could get a passenger who was actually there to say the mom was yelling/mad/looked violent, etc, they would be jumping at it.

I do think that some of the details if correct paint UA in a bad light. E.g. selling her a sandwich, and then, despite a reasonable request refusing to warm it. Last I looked the A319/320 have an oven. The FA may not have wanted to help out, but he could have. That causes me to again not want to credit the FA here.

Do you really need me to answer this question. Of course it did, the A319/320 have ovens, they could easily have warmed something for the mom, you know this. But that would be "austism-friendly" And before you say "but were they working" of course they were, they then gave her warm food (some rice) from FC.

If we put our thinking caps on here, there are two possible answers. The first is that on every single flight, since she was little, and going oversees, the airline warmed up the food so there "was steam rolling off it" or second as I suspect she is not quite as picky, and is more like my (younger) kids who sometimes turn up their nose at cold food. Regardless, that the family has traveled a lot -including PDX-IAH-MCO-IAH - with no incident makes me think the FA did not handle this well.

JOSECONLSCREW28

According to an employee who met the flight when it diverted to SLC there is a lot more to the story then what the media or bloggers are protraying. Unfortunately she wasn't able to go into much detail about it. So it looks like we are only hearing part of what really happened.

spin88

That may be, and those who actually saw what happened are the key. But at this point, 5 folks w/o an ax to grind are on record saying that the FA overreacted. So far there is nothing reported to supports the FA reasonably seeing a threat. Not saying it is not possible, just that it has not yet happened.

If there is litigation, we can pull over a bowl of pop-corn.

leonidas

Paranoia + crappy planes + disgruntled employees = fantastic flying experience.

Tchiowa

Remember the scene in the movie "A Few Good Men" where Tom Cruise is the lawyer and he's practicing a cross examination using his friends as witnesses. He asks something like "Is there any direct evidence of violence?" to which the response is "You mean other than the dead body?"?

This is being played over and over in this thread. A lot of people asking for or claiming there isn't any evidence of a threat.

You mean other than the mother admitting she made the threat?

suzy1K

1) WFBF (Want First Buy First)
2) UAL would likely fire a FA for just about any excuse (if they could - the union couldn't help on this one) so please appreciate that the FA likely thought long & hard about serving a first class meal to an economy passenger, especially in this particular instance with all the fuss & fury. It goes beyond wanting to help the young girl, despite whatever the mom was up to.
Also, the FA surely would have suspected that other pax might be recording his/her actions or planning on writing into customer service about (or tweeting) the extraneous meal service. No good deed goes unpunished. [Its not like when a nice FA slips you a warm chocolate chip cookie when you're sitting in the bulkhead on a red-eye where nobody else might notice - ahhh warm pre-merger memories]

There are probably active (or ex) crew members on this forum who can comment further on this.

Martina70

Even if you want to believe the most sanitized accounts of what the mother said, that she might scratch..rather that she might scratch someone
even if you want to believe that she said this also couched with a pretty please and a thank you....'context' and 'validity' matters very little.

If that was the case, we wouldn't hear about folks being arrested or fined for making 'jokes' about threats.



https://www.yahoo.com/travel/doctors...e-104158537382.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...orism-Act.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...orism-Act.html

Those are just the first three links that came up

Are you so certain that context and tone are decisive enough that you would be willing to make the same types of 'jokes' or vents?

reamworks

Every passenger who was delayed by the stop in SLC has an ax to grind.

JBord

Not to mention how many of these people only saw and heard bits of the total interaction.

Next time you're in an airport, take 5 minutes to just people watch. Air travelers might be the most unaware people in the world. They wear headphones, they have their eyes on a screen, they walk in a crowd of people and suddenly stop or turn around and are shocked that someone else was in the hallway with them.
Same thing on a lot of flights.

It would be interesting to see some of these folks under cross examination I think.

rufflesinc

Like a child claiming to have an awesome secret they can't tell you.

JBord

Ummm, there's a lawsuit being threatened and this person could be a witness. Likely orders from UA's attorneys.

Would you risk your employment like this, if in a similar situation?

wrp96

For example, in SJO yesterday, all the boards for all the airlines had signs stating the airport was closed due to volcanic ash. And every agent was notifying everyone individually about the reason, and rebooking connections, etc. And yet a person seated next to me in the gate area was complaining about how terrible our airline was because they delayed our flight, "because they can't maintain their planes." People see what they want to see, and hear what they want to hear.

Loren Pechtel

That's what usually happens--privacy rules don't permit revealing what really happened.

rufflesinc

Then they shouldn't have said ANYTHING.

LarryJ

Every airline that I've ever worked for, and I've worked for six airlines, has had policies that prohibit making public statements with such details.