Two sisters in Florida are demanding crew members at an American airline be fired after they were kicked off a flight, forcing them to miss a chance to say goodbye to their dying father.
On Monday, Debbie Hartman and Trisha Baker said they were on an Allegiant Air flight from Florida to North Carolina to visit their ailing father, when Baker received a text message that her father, who was in hospice care, only had hours to live.
“I didn’t know if my sister was getting the same text and I was thinking I need to go back and tell her,” said Baker to CBS News.
However, when Baker went to tell her sister, who was sitting rows away from her, a flight attendant told Baker to get back into her seat.
“I said, ‘well, can I just sit here? I just want to console my sister. We just got word that my dad’s dying,”’ Baker said.
During the incident, Hartman said she began having a panic attack so her sister confronted the crew member about the way she was handling the situation.
That’s when Hartman said the flight attendant told her sister to “keep her personal problems off the plane.”
“They don’t have a heart. They didn’t care that I wasn’t going to see my dad,” said Hartman.
A woman, who claimed to have witnessed the event unfold on the flight, posted a five-minute video to YouTube and said what she saw was unforgivable.
“That was the most inhumane, deplorable thing I’ve seen any human being do,” said the woman in the video.
According to CBS affiliate, WKMG, the flight attendant notified the captain of the situation. Moments later, the plane returned to the gate and security escorted the pair off of the flight.
The sisters claimed security told them they were seen as a threat.
Hartman and Baker then tried to catch another flight but were unable to make it to see their father before he passed away.
“One hundred thousand per cent I blame them. They were the gate between keeping me from my father to say goodbye,” Hartman told WKMG.
Allegiant Air released a statement to WKMG, reading: “At Allegiant, we rely on our crew members to provide and oversee a safe environment for every passenger, on every flight. 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.”
Global News has reached out to Allegiant Air.
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