Worth a read
I recall an incident told to us on my cc training course some years ago. Sorry it's quite long but it will make you think twice.
Boarding the last flight on a friday night of a S/H domestic, lots of business people making their way home for the weekend. One well dressed man boards and goes straight into the a toilet at the back. The crew member down the back hears strange noises and what sounds like a bit of vandalism going on. The man comes out and goes back to his seat. The crew member checks the toilet and sure enough its a bit of a mess. He calls the front and tells the purser, who asks the crew member to keep an eye on the pax. Meanwhile the man then continues to act strangely and keeps pulling his table up and down. The crew then decide he is either mad or under the influence of something so they initiate getting him offloaded. The police arrive and he is escorted off the a/c and the flight proceeds normally.
Did the crew do the right thing?
It turns out that this man was a pathologist and his last case of the week was a road traffic accident where a young woman had died. When he pulled back the sheet to start the autopsy he found it was his daughter.
The man was trying to get home to his wife and was obviously very upset.
I do not know if this story is true but it certainly could be. It made me realise that when you are going to do a job that involves dealing with thousands of people there will be times that you cannot just quote rules and regulations. Certainly there are a great many rude and ignorant people out there and often they just love to create arguments, sometimes though there is a good reason why they are not acting like rational people. People travel for business, leisure and some people need to fly to get somewhere quickly because there is a personal crisis unfolding.
And that is also the same for the crew as some will almost certainly be at work when they really should be at home dealing with whatever crisis is going on there but are at work just trying to get through another day. Will they behave rationally when faced with an 'idiot'? Probably not.
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