A video uploaded to Twitter yesterday has gone viral, and has already been viewed more than a million times. This footage was taken on a Ryanair flight on Friday from Barcelona to London Stansted (FR15).
Those seated nearby say that the dispute started when the woman in the aisle couldn’t get up fast enough to let the guy in the window seat in. The woman’s daughter was seated nearby and explained to the guy that her mom was disabled.
At this point the man in the window seat calls the woman in the aisle seat an “ugly black bastard” and “an ugly f*&^ing c*&^,” he told her “don’t talk to me in a foreign language you stupid ugly cow,” and said “if you don’t go to another seat I’ll push you to another seat.”
Here’s the video:
https://twitter.com/_SJPeace_/status/1053743128564416512
What did the crew do? Despite the insistence of those seated around (who witnessed the interaction) to kick him off the flight, the flight attendant moved the woman to another seat and requested a supervisor. He simply said “don’t be so rude, you have to calm down” to the man.
This kind of verbal abuse is completely unacceptable, and it’s shameful that this is all the cabin crew did. While there are some issues where crews go on power trips and perhaps kick people off unnecessarily, this wasn’t one of them.
I’m not sure if the horrible way the crew handled this comes down to the flight attendant not having seen everything that happened, or if it just comes down to the general issues Ryanair cabin crew face.
A majority of Ryanair cabin crew don’t even work directly for the airline, but rather for employment agencies. Their primary metric of success is how much they manage to sell onboard, and they can be disciplined if they don’t push sales hard enough. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them are afraid to bring up issues that could delay the flight, in fear of the company acting out against them.
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