It’s unlikely that getting kicked off a flight is ever a pleasant experience, but two sisters say that when Allegiant Air removed them from a recent flight, they found themselves in a nightmare, unable to reach their father in hospice care before he passed away.
The sisters were traveling from Orlando to Asheville, NC to see their father, who was dying of stage 4 cancer, NBC News reports. They were on the plane, seated apart from each other, waiting for the flight to take off when they got a text saying the end was near for their dad.
“I get a text saying it’s going to be his last night. We’re scared to death,” one of the women told NBC. She went over her sister’s seat to tell her the news, in case she hadn’t received the same message. When she got up, she says a flight attendant stepped in.
“She said, ‘You need to sit down,’ and I said, ‘Well, can I just sit here? I just want to console my sister. We just got word that my dad’s dying,’” she told CBS News.
She told the attendant their father was dying, and that she should show some compassion.
But she says the flight attendant replied, “You need to leave your personal problems off the plane.” To which one of the women responded that perhaps she should consider a new line of work if she couldn’t summon more compassion.
After that comment, the flight attendant called the pilot. Police and airport officials then escorted the women off the flight.
“I knew I was not going to see my dad then. I was begging all the way out the plane and it was very humiliating, now that I look back, but I was in shock, and I was saying, ‘could you please let me go see my dad. Please, he’s dying,'” one of the women said.
The sisters were unable to rebook a flight that night, and instead rebooked for the next day. One of the sisters told WKMG Orlando that their father died the next morning, and she wants the airline to be held accountable.
“I would like to see them in some way be punished in a way where people understand. This is not humane. One-hundred thousand percent I blame them. They were the gate between keeping me from my father to say goodbye,” she said.
Other passengers agreed, included a fellow traveler who posted a video on YouTube describing an incident that matches up with the sisters’ version of events.
“Something I just witnessed on the airplane that was completely inhumane and deplorable, that everybody was in shock,” the passenger says in the video.
Allegiant Air says it’s investigating.
“At Allegiant, we rely on our crew members to provide and oversee a safe environment for every passenger, on every flight,” the airline said in a statement. “We expect that authority to be exercised both judiciously and consistently, with empathy and with good judgment. We take this customer feedback seriously and are in the process of conducting an investigation into what occurred.”
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