WTF, Delta?
“You’re saying you’re gonna give that away to someone else when I paid for that seat?” Brian Schear says to an airline employee. “That’s not right.”
Eventually he agreed to hold his son on his lap for the flight - but it was too late. The airline said the whole family had to leave.
That was around midnight, and the couple and their two toddlers were left having to scramble for a hotel room and pay $2,000 for another flight the next day, on United.
Schear says he originally bought the seat for his 18-year-old son Mason, but then decided to send him home on an earlier flight so that he could use the seat for his younger child, Grayson, who was placed in a car seat.
The airline staff tells him they need the seat because the flight is overbooked and the original passenger whose name was on the seat isn’t using it. One airline employee tells him that under FAA regulations, 2-year-old children are not supposed to have their own seats at all and are supposed to sit in parents’ laps for the duration of the flight.
“With him being two, he cannot sit in the car seat,” one airline employee tells him. “He has to sit in your arms the whole time.”
The accuracy of that statement is not entirely clear, as the websites for both the FAA and Delta appear to encourage parents to buy separate seats for young children and use a child safety restraint system.
RELATED: FAA tip sheet for traveling with small children
“We want you and your children to have the safest, most comfortable flight possible,” Delta’s website advises parents. “For kids under the age of two, we recommend you purchase a seat on the aircraft and use an approved child safety seat.”
Schear says Grayson flew in his own seat on the original flight out to Hawaii without a problem. He says Delta knew he was planning to use the seat for his younger son when they boarded their return flight.
“You need to do what’s right,” he tells the airline employee. “I bought the seat and you need to just leave us alone.”
The encounter came as the airline industry is already facing bad publicity for video that showed a doctor being forcibly dragged off an overbooked Chicago flight on United, resulting in a concussion, broken nose and two lost teeth.
Eyewitness News reached out to Delta for comment, but has not heard back. The Schear family says the airline reached out to them earlier Wednesday to find out more information after they posted their encounter on Facebook and YouTube and began talking to Eyewitness News.
Tone Deaf.
What the hell..... “you’re going to jail”??
If they paid for the seat then they have the right to refuse. There are limits but I’d like to know if they paid for a ticket for the child.
The family did not book a seat for the two-year old so were not entitled to it. The FA lied about the repercussions of not giving up the seat and the policy on lap children. Both sides handled the situation poorly.
According to the fine print we can do this because this seat was supposed to be occupied by someone else and that person is not here. So, no 10,000 dollars for YOU peasant! And you and your whole steenkin' family can now UNASS the plane!
..since 911 the entire industry and government agencies connected with it have gone completely insane—add that to Trump’s list of things to fix...
Can we please stop turning all this airline stuff into the cause celebre`?
Seriously; they’re picking on every incident, which I’m sure have been happening all along. Nothing unusual. This is like the media “shark attack” stuff before 9/11 squelched it.
Media just looking for stories. Besides Trump-bashing.
The guy stayed fairly calm throughout. The whole thing is wrong! From Delta!
"You have to give up the seat or you're going to jail, your wife is going to jail and they'll take your kids from you," Brian Schear recalled the airline staff telling him.
I need independent witness verification of that statement before I believe this.
They paid for three seats but an older child went on another flight. Thus the name for
the seat was no longer valid. They should have left the sons name on the ticket and used
it for the 2 yo. But again info in this article may not all be accurate either.
I have a solution: don’t overbook flights.
Any airline that does gets shut down permanently.
Another 1 million dollar mistake. Pretty soon that will add up to real money and they’ll have to really overbook flights to make a profit.
We will see when more facts come out, but the story above does make it sound as if dad changed the ticket to be in the younger son’s name while purchasing another ticket for the older son on a different flight. But of course the FReeper know-nothing’s who love to bow to authority will automatically side with the airline, despite the fact that having a two year old as a “lap child” for a flight of that duration is inappropriate
So they didn’t pay for the seat but wanted it for free anyhow because they are “entitled.” No wonder they were thrown off the plane.
Didn’t Delta refuse to send a top dog VIP to the recent Congressional hearing?
They didn’t pay for the toddler’s seat. Their teenager son may have paid for a seat, but it was not transferrable to the toddler. Bottom line, the toddler didn’t pay for a seat and therefore was not entitled to a seat.
Brian Schear was blatantly trying to cheat the system. You just cannot give the ticket to another person. You have to cancel the first ticket for your elder son and buy a new sear for your toddler. Everybody knows that in this post-911 era. FAA regs won’t allow a passenger not on the manifest to fly. The airline cannot choose which regs to enforce and which to ignore.
How in the world did they get the toddler past security and onto the plane in the first place? His name did not match the passenger manifest. Maybe the similarity of the kids’ first names fooled the TSA and airline people - Mason and Grayson. It’s another breakdown in security.
As I said on another thread today:
22,000 flights a day, 365 days a year. It should not really be news that every couple of weeks an airline employee connected with one of those many flights does something stupid or less than photogenic. I’m more worried about terrorists (ISIS, Al Qaeda, Antifa, the DNC, and Black Lives Matter), and about our elected politicians.
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In this particular case, the family handled this completely wrong. They were required to show ID for an 18 y/o for that seat to be taken (as registered when the seat was purchased), or to go through the proper procedure to change the ticket. I’ve done that sort of change and had to pay extra to handle it properly, instead of hoping to sneak by. Instead, they put a child who had not properly checked in on that seat and assumed that reserved the seat for the child. The airline would have seen that as what it was - an un-ticketed passenger in a seat whose occupant had not checked in.
I don’t like it, but that’s where we are in terms of security and airline “service”. The airline was tone deaf, in terms of recent news, but the family was completely wrong. Airline seats are purchased by and reserved for individuals, not by and for families. That’s something TSA requires, when they are not too busy molesting innocent travelers.