Leaving the scene of a confrontation: Airline edition

Susan Edmiston, co-author of The Cow in the Parking Lot, gives her take on the infamous JetBlue flight attendant whose angry escape from his “workplace,” an airplane mid-runway, has been all over the news.

Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant who responded to a passenger’s offensive behavior by chewing her out over the public address system and fleeing down the plane’s chute, has become something of a folk hero for dramatizing the tensions that arise out of today’s often-frustrating air travel.

This appears to be one of those situations where it’s not clear what will turn out for the best. The NY Times this a.m. dredged up the story about the bus driver many years ago in NY who got so fed up that he went awol and drove the bus to Florida.

To be sure, Slater took some serious risks in his response.  He had to spend a night in jail, faces serious charges, and may well be fined for the expenses involved in deploying the chute.  Nevertheless, his response to the passenger’s reported hostility was sort of creative.

It appears to be coming out from what I’ve read that it was the passenger who was abusive and intentionally slammed the overhead bin door on the flight attendant’s head.  Passengers on the plane wrote into the NY Times that he had a gash on his head from this event, and lost it when the same woman got out of her seat before the plane had come to a stop and was abusive again when he told her to sit down.  The flight attendant actually thanked the other passengers before he took the slide.

Many readers’ responses to the Times’s blog post were along the lines of, “Why doesn’t someone charge the passenger with assault?”

The flight attendant’s response bears some similarity to the response to anger directed at us by others that we recommend in The Cow in the Parking Lot — Leave the scene!  He did it with style.  Whether the reward he will reap from his fifteen minutes of fame will outweigh the cost of his outburst (and bust out) remains to be seen.  At least, in this day of enraged workplace murders,he did not physically retaliate.