On October 13th, as USAToday reports, The Gillette family…a couple and their 22-month old, were removed from a flight from Burlington, Vermont to New York. The flight, a Freedom Airlines(ironic name considering the circumstances) flight operated under the banner of Delta, is a relatively short one on a somewhat small aircraft.
As they waited to leave, Mrs. Gillette began to nurse her child. The flight attendant tried to hand Mrs Gillette a blanket, asking her to cover herself, something she refused to do. A few minutes later, a gate agent boarded and advised them the flight attendant had ordered them removed. As it was the last flight of the night, they were given a hotel room and rebooked on another flight in the morning.
In a show of support, around 30 parents and dozens of children staged a protest…called a “Nurse-In” at Burlington Airport on the 15th. “No woman should ever be ashamed of breast-feeding,” Mrs. Gillette commented.
In a long overdue press release on Friday, the Mesa Air Group, of which Freedom is a part, blamed the incident on a new flight attendant who made an incorrect decision…one that has been rectified in training. Either way, both Delta, the Mesa Air Group, and its subsidiaries support a mother’s right to nurse their babies onboard and have no policies to hinder it.
The operative word here is discretion, in our opinion. Breast-feeding is not a shameful activity, but being considerate of others and their feelings is also a factor in this, as it is in many airline issues involving behavior perceived as offensive. Generally, in these cases, flight attendants are supposed to get a second opinion from one of their colleagues to check their own perceptions and to balance the various issues involved as well as try to mediate the situation with the passenger. Passengers often are not interested in alternative viewpoints though and regional flights are often operated with only a single flight attendant.
We think the failure in this situation is not only in the training of flight attendants on the issue of breastfeeding, but on dealing with the balance between individual passenger rights on an aircraft. We tend to defend flight attendants on one level for trying to keep planes as orderly as possible, but critique them for some of their decisions with a full awareness of how hard it can be to make those decisions. A person cannot be right 100% of the time, and even with as much training as a company can muster, they will still occasionally make what turns out to be a wrong decision.