A fight broke out on Spirit Airlines flight 141 from Baltimore to Los Angeles yesterday morning. Two women, reported to be intoxicated, brought a “boom box” onto the flight and were playing their music loudly. When a group of other women complained, they turned up the tunes and waved their boombox in the air. Apparently this went on for nearly the duration of the flight and a fight broke out between the two women. Screaming, punching, hair pulling, the works. One of the flight attendants was punched in the face. Several onlookers recorded the fight on their iPhones so that they could share on the Internet and get likes and ad dollars and whatnot.
Here’s a report from the Los Angeles Times (link).
Being a somewhat opinionated individual, I have several thoughts on this story.
Spirit Airlines flight 141 from Baltimore to Los Angeles left BWI at 0824 ET, arriving at LAX at 1034 PT. That’s might early to be intoxicated.
I’ve never flown on Spirit Airlines because, well, they don’t have a reputation for being a classy outfit and I tend to steer away from those types of experiences, especially when it involves being sealed up in an aluminum tube at 35,000 feet for several hours with a bunch of strangers. I have the impression that Spirit Airlines is basically a Wal*mart checkout line with wings.
While I don’t think this was a 1980s boombox, complete with cassette deck and the like, it’s rude to play your music without headphones in a public space, period, end of story, full stop. Earl and I had to endure a woman in a diner over the holidays that kept playing Christmas music off her iPhone and dancing around her booth as she waited for her double portion of Pork Roll. To this day I still can’t wipe out the horrible fidelity of the music nor the ugly Christmas sweater from my memory.
Who gets into a fist fight on an airplane? Who has the energy to get into a fist fight at 10:30 in the morning? Why did the TSA allow a boombox on the airplane in the first place? (Quick side note – the bomb that brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland was concealed in a boombox). Why did the flight attendants address the issue before the situation escalated into a fight between passengers? Why didn’t the passengers recording the fight on their mobile devices step in and try to stop it?
If I had been the pilot I would have introduced the passengers to a maneuver called a “steep turn”. That would have shut them up. There’s a reason I don’t fly for the airlines.
Back to the intoxication. Why were they allowed on the flight? In my years of airline travel I’ve seen a few passengers pulled from a flight for being too drunk. The airline put them up in a hotel so they could sober up and fly safely the next day. Why were these intoxicated women allowed on the flight?
This is yet another example of the dwindling of any sort of manners, dignity or socially acceptable behavior in public. As trash continues to be glorified by the media people think they can do whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want.
It’s just another example of The New Spirit of America.
