Delta aiming for soft landing
LOS ANGELES — Delta Air Lines is offering refunds and compensation to a California family that says they were forced off a plane and threatened with jail after refusing to give up one of their seats on a crowded flight.
A video of the April 23 incident was uploaded to YouTube Wednesday and added to the list of recent encounters on airlines that have gone viral, including the dragging of a bloodied passenger off a United Express plane.
Brian and Brittany Schear of Huntington Beach, Calif., told KABC-TV in Los Angeles that they were returning from Hawaii with their two toddlers. They wanted to put one of the children in a seat they had bought for their 18-year-old son, who instead flew home on an earlier flight.
Delta says on its website that tickets cannot be transferred and name changes are not allowed. Federal regulations do not bar changing the name on a ticket as long as the new passenger’s name can be run through a database before the flight, according to a Transportation Security Administration spokesman.
By late yesterday afternoon, Delta still had not explained why the Schears were removed from the plane. A spokesman said the flight was not overbooked.
On the video, Brian Schear can be heard talking with a person off-camera — it is not clear whether that person is a Delta employee, a security officer, or somebody else. After Schear says that he won’t leave — the airline will have to remove him — the person off-camera replies, “You and your wife will be in jail ... it’s a federal offense if you don’t abide” by an airline crew’s order.
The Atlanta-based airline issued an updated statement yesterday afternoon.
“We are sorry for the unfortunate experience our customers had with Delta, and we’ve reached out to them to refund their travel and provide additional compensation,” the statement read. Delta said its goal is to work with customers to resolve travel issues, “that did not happen in this case and we apologize.”