There Was A Full Blown Airplane Brawl At 30,000 Feet Because Of A Seat That Apparently Couldn't Unrecline
River City Post- With unruly passenger incidents at an all-time high, a fight broke out between two passengers on a Sunday flight from New Orleans to Austin, according to a television news report. A video sent to KXAN in Austin shows two men swinging at each other on an American Airlines flight as other passengers try to pull them off of each other or keep them away from seated passengers.
A passenger told the news station the incident started “over a seat that couldn’t unrecline.” A statement from American didn’t elaborate on the cause of the fight, but said “law enforcement was requested.” The two men were reportedly detained, and the flight landed in Austin at 4:30 p.m.
After all the embracing debate about whether or not it's okay to recline into someone's cramped airspace on an airplane, we finally had someone fuck around and find out if someone would actually throw hands over it. I can't say I'm surprised considering how much people are dug into their stances on this hot button issue. What I am surprised about is when the fight took place.
Nobody should be fighting once the plane is 30,000 feet high, which I believe is known as cruising altitude in the industry. That's the time you can take your seat belt off, put your tray down, and start figuring out which snacks you are going to pair with your ginger ale that always hits different when you are miles above from the ground.
If you want to beat up a random stranger, you should either do it before you take off when everyone is still filled with the angst of trying to board the plane they will be on for hours or after you land when all the shit heads run into the aisle to try to deplane before everyone else. But every airplane passenger should be as relaxed as they are going to get once they are in the clouds and free from ear popping altitude changes as well as hopefully some turbulence, even if some rando is all up in your kitchen with a reclined seat that may or may not be broken.
As for the actual fight, I love how the dude in the Where's Waldo shirt was the one dishing out haymakers despite appearing to start out as the one trying to keep the peace before he took a rogue left hook to the jaw. From that moment on, all he saw was red like the stripes in his shirt as he mollywhopped a person he never met onto a bunch of other people he never met in a giant tin can soaring hundreds of miles per hour in the air. Mankind being responsible for all the good, bad, and ugly in this video along with the cameraman that kept recording as people essentially fought on his lap is truly why our species is such a beautiful riddle.
P.S. I feel like the one common denominator for in-flight fights are seat backs like this:
I don't know if that seat is reclined or not. But you know what that seat most certainly isn't? A seat with a TV. I flew for the first time with my kids earlier this month and neither one of them had a single issue either way because they were mindlessly staring at a screen on JetBlue the entire time. I'm not saying you won't have fights if you have screens. But I guarantee you the rate of fights during flight would plummet if everyone could dull their brain by staring at a movie or live TV. You need to have a solid selection of movies and TV channels for this to work however or else you are going to have an airplane full of people even more pissed at the shitty entertainment options. I guess whenever the overlords at PENN get sick of paying me to blog smut, I have a future career in airline television screen sales.