Humanity versus Safety

There was a story that hit the news last week about a family being removed from a Jet Blue flight to Boston when they were unable to get their 2-year-old daughter to stop having a tantrum and sit down for takeoff. The parents insist that their toddler is a good kid who was just having a bad day – and a particularly bad meltdown –and claim that the airline should have showed them “a little bit of humanity” in letting them continue on board. Instead, the pilot decided to return to the gate and have the family taken off the plane, citing safety reasons. There’s no question that the airline was within its legal rights – FAA regulations leave safety decisions to the pilot, and if he or she feels that a given passenger needs to be taken off the aircraft, that’s what happens. But from a business standpoint, it does raise the question of what to do about these confrontations…

First off, it seems obvious that no one goes around trying to get their toddlers to misbehave in public. Even those delusional parents who apparently believe that everyone in the world finds their shrieking offspring as delightful as they do will, in general, want to avoid attracting attention and making a scene when they’re stuck in a small aluminum tube at 30,000 feet with a bunch of increasingly irritable strangers. By the same token, we should probably acknowledge that even the best behaved children in the world will occasionally perform less than perfectly, especially when under stress or outside of their comfort zone. However, none of that changes the fact that air travel is stressful for adults, too, and having to do it while someone else’s child is screaming his or her head off and running around the aircraft like a maniac is not going to help…

Second, however little the parents in our story might want to admit it, the pilot’s safety concerns are quite real. If the aircraft encounters any serious turbulence there’s a definite chance of a passenger being thrown into a wall or bulkhead and seriously injured, and if that passenger is a two-year-old who won’t sit down those injuries could be fatal. For that matter, if the plane loses cabin pressure and the parents can’t get an oxygen mask on the toddler because he or she is running around the cabin, the child and whichever parent tries to go and get her could both die of asphyxia before the flight crew can get the aircraft down under 15,000 feet, and if there’s an emergency landing a toddler running loose could easily be trampled to death by other passengers trying to flee from the wreck. And none of that even considers the risks inherent in the parents (and/or their offspring) being beaten to death by irate passengers who can’t stand another minute of having someone else’s child screaming his or her head off…

I kid, of course, but I’d be willing to bet you cash that at least some of the other passengers were applauding (or wanted to, at least) when the family in our story was taken off the airplane. It’s possible that the parents are correct, and the airline has a responsibility to them, in terms of humanity or sympathy. But we should remember that the company is also responsible for the safety and comfort of the other 150 or so people aboard that flight, not to mention their employees, stockholders, vendors, and other stakeholders, all of whom will be harmed in various ways if the airline is sued, grounded, or forced out of business. In the long run, if a customer has been asked to get their children to sit down and hold still for takeoff, and after a significant delay they’re still having to “hold them down” to keep one of the children from exploding off across the cabin (while still shrieking his or her head off), it’s probably unreasonable to expect the airline to put everyone else at risk…