A mother with an infant says she faced discrimination on a Flair Airlines flight when all she wanted to do was sit in the seat she paid for and was assigned.
The cabin confrontation was caught on video by Busayo Alle, who recorded it on her phone.
Alle, her 12-week-old baby, and her mother-in-law boarded Flair Airlines flight F8804 in Vancouver one day last week. Assigned to seat 2A, the nursing mother was surprised to find another passenger in her seat.
Alle, a Black woman who recently moved to Canada from Nigeria, asked the white woman sitting in her seat if she would please move. Alle says the passenger said “no.”
In the recorded video you can hear Alle say to a flight attendant, “Do you see the problem here?”
In a statement, the airline told CTV National News "staff did ask the passenger in 2A to move to her assigned seat, but she refused multiple times. Unfortunately, this caused the situation to escalate."
Alle tells CTV National News, “The airline staff could have undone the mistake if they had forced the passenger to stand up. Instead they kind of allowed it to happen.”
Other passengers who watched the situation unfold generously offered their seats to the mother and baby. In the video Alle is heard telling the kind passengers, “I’m sorry, I don’t want to voice my anger.”
The new mother admits she was clearly becoming agitated by the airline staff's conduct.
She said the situation escalated when a Flair Airlines' employee told her to “calm down” and adding, “If you're not calming down we have to get you out of this aircraft.”
All the while, the woman in Alle's seat was able to sit back and watch, she said.
Speaking to CTV News from Calgary, Alle’s husband, Adeola Alle, says “it’s discrimination.”
Frustrated and angry, he feels the airline “threatened a family with a little kid.”
The Alles believe Flair Airlines staff should have demanded the difficult passenger get up or get off the flight. The company’s own website lists "refusal to follow instructions of the crew" as a "prohibited behaviour."
When CTV News asked the airline why they didn’t remove the problem passenger, an email response states, in part, “our flight attendants did offer a solution and attempted to deescalate the situation.”
The Alles say the only option presented was for the mother and baby to move or get kicked off the flight.
Flair said, “The resolution for the flight was to seat the passenger in the window seat on the other side of the aircraft – the same row and seat, just on the other side of the plane.”
Busayo Alle questions whether it would have been different if she was the one refusing to vacate another passenger's seat. Answering her own question, Alle says she believes “security and police would have come and I would have been carried off the flight.”
Alle, her baby and mother-in-law did eventually move to seats on the opposite side of the aisle, at which point she claims the woman, still sitting in her seat, gave her the middle finger.
After CTV News reached out to Flair Airlines, the Alles’ tickets for the flight were fully refunded, but the family says this isn’t about the money.
“It's about acknowledging you did my family wrong, and apologizing for it,” says Alle’s husband.
Flair Airlines says a representative called the family and apologized. The Alles did receive a phone call, but they say they haven’t received a clear apology from the company.
In addition, the company said, "The safety and comfort of our passengers is the airlines' highest priority, and we want every passenger to have an enjoyable experience with Flair. Flair Airlines is investigating the circumstances of the incident, passenger actions, and our staff response."
In a statement to CTV News, it continued, "Our staff are trained to de-escalate situations that arise related to boarding. We ask that our passengers take their assigned seats to limit any stress to fellow passengers, and that may not have happened here."
Asked why they wanted to take their story public, Alle says, “Silence breeds acceptance. We need to share what we experienced so it never happens again.”
