A US poll found a heavy majority favored segregated family sections on airplanes. It was a goal endorsed by 73% of those contacted by Maritz Research.
It’s a subject that has heated up this summer with such incidents as a three-year-old girl who threw a temper tantrum and refused to be belted into her seat. She was removed, along with her parents, from an AirTran Airways Flight.
The airline reimbursed the parents but when the parents went public, AirTran received more than 8,000 e-mails — nearly all of them supportive.
More recently, there was the Benadryl incident. When a toddler kept repeating “Bye-Bye plane,” an attendant suggested a dose of Benadryl. The mother refused. Mother and child were removed. Fellow passenger’s stories backed up the mother’s version of events.
In some cases, passengers have become irate about children. Fellow passengers on a flight from Florida to New York shouted at a woman to stop a child who would not stop crying.
No wonder some kids are upset. In some cases, babies have been among those stuck for more than 10 hours on stranded planes without food and water.
Report by David Wilkening
