I would not be surprised if the 3 FAs saw Ivy sitting on her mother’s lap and said nothing, likely because it was not ready to take off. I’ve been on my phone and FAs have seen me, but no one bothered to say anything until they were prepping for take off. So, as far as I am concerned, the other 3 FAs are a nonsequitur.
Nor do I believe that the FA said “Make her sit.” (Mom probably exaggerated to get public sympathy.) More likely, the FA said that Ivy needed to be in her own seat.
And if you believe that Mom really didn’t know that there were car seats that could support her child, well, I have a lovely bridge for sale . . .
What if Ivy were 6 but still had the cognitive skills of a 6 month old? Does she then, at 30 pounds, still get to sit in her mother’s lap against FAA rules? No. This was not a tiny 2 year old just above the legal limit of a lap child. This is a 25 pound almost 4 year old child. I had one of these. Skinny, tiny kid, but still a 3 year old who needed her own seat. If you look at the family picture, the child has looong legs and is as tall as a 3+ year old. There is no way the mother could safely hold her during an emergency or even turbulence. The child needed to be in seat.
Yes there are exceptions, but who are we to overrule the trained flight attendant and the pilot. They felt THIS child needed to be in a proper restraint. I do fault the pilot for not putting a stop to it immediately. Sit in the assigned seat or get off. No arguments. Do what you are told. That’s what you agreed to do when you bought the ticket.
“She added that the tickets were purchased with frequent-flyer miles; when the seats were assigned at the airport, she said, she and her husband, Jeff, were assigned seats in business class, but their four children (ages 11, 8, 6 and 3) were assigned seats in economy. Kirschenbaum said she switched seats with other family members traveling with their group so that she could sit with her young children.”
Yes, I mentioned that a while back that it was all purchased with ff miles. They had 12 premium and 4 coach. Whose name was on what seat is completely irrelevant to anything, since obviously family members can switch amongst themselves. A sister in law / brother in law took the coach seats so the 6 Kirschenbaums could sit together in premium.
There are pictures of this child in a stroller and on the back of a bicycle and the mom’s twitter is deleted. But, not before she proudly tweeted about her plan to get the FA fired. It became personal and other passengers missed connecting flights because of this woman who then decided maybe the attention would be helpful in her fundraising activities. But, it backfired.
There were 2 twitter accounts publicly available (so am mentioning because its public info): unitedwithivy and kirsch71. Are they both gone? And then there was a retaliatory tweet unitedwithunited. The whole thing has become a PR nightmare, sadly.
Kirsch71 was her personal twitter. It’s deleted. From my very quick Googling I found a few causes she is involved in as a fundraiser all dealing with disabled kids. There’s nothing wrong with that of course but I just think she overdid it with her bid for attention arising out of this incident and it backfired.
unitedwithivy is a hashtag. And unitedwithunited is the response hashtag. PR nightmare is right.
@pizzagirl, I think the quote implies that they were randomly reassigned seats in Business class. Is that possible due to holiday overbooking or for some other reason? Or would ff seats have to stay where they were purchased?
If I were an airline and had to bump some people up a class I would choose the paying customers first. But, I heard this whole thing was a party for or by the H’s Dad, so maybe he did the purchasing or he’s a flying bigwig or something.
I know that my in-laws offered to pay for airline tickets for H and I to come visit for the holidays but wouldn’t pay for extra seats for our twins, who were 3 or so at the time. They said, “but everyone does it”. We didn’t do it. OTOH when H was leaving for a trip to see his sister’s graduation, our youngest daughter burst into tears at the airport and he decided, on the spur of the moment, to just take her with him and hold her on his lap! I think she was 3. No excuses here - I’m amazed he got away with it and it was years before 9/11 but I knew even then that it was an iffy situation, at best.
Oh goodness gracious! If I have 16 family members, with 12 premium seats and 4 coach seats, I can seat my family members anywhere I want within those 16, provided everyone is self sufficient and I’m not putting children in an exit row or leaving children unattended. Who is specifically assigned what seat is completely irrelevant to anything. I don’t know why people are focused on that.
If you all buy (or redeem) tickets for your family and the 4 of you get 16a, 16b, 16c and 16d, I surely hope you all know that you can distribute yourselves anyway you like in the row regardless of who technically got assigned what seat!
“I were an airline and had to bump some people up a class I would choose the paying customers first. But, I heard this whole thing was a party for or by the H’s Dad, so maybe he did the purchasing or he’s a flying bigwig or something.”
The grandfather apparently redeemed miles. In a situation like that, it’s irrelevant whose name is specifically on what ticket. Just like if you are assigned 16a and your husband gets 16b, it’s ok for you to switch if he prefers the window. There is not a single FA in the world who will care.
This has nothing to do with bumping up passengers, nothing at all.
Also, airlines will deal with seat rearranging at the gate. We had that happen once. We had confirmed seats…DH with DS in one row, and DD and me in the row behind them. And we had boarding passes. When I got to the gate, I checked to see if all was well…well…it wasn’t. They had reassigned us all over the plane. Neither parent next to our young kids.
I politely said “that is fine with me, as long as the adults next to my 3 and 6 year old don’t mind supervising them.”
Amazing how quickly that gate agent was able to move us around!
If they were randomly assigned, or re-assigned seats - then the way to deal with that would have been to talk to the agent at the gate. They would have seen from their boarding passes that there was a problem. They could have also worked it out among themselves – they collectively had 16 seats to work with- they could have made sure that that whichever parent was tending to the 3 year old would be by an empty seat.