It can be unpleasant to share a plane with a fussy child, but some one airline took measures into their own hands to deal with the situation. A three-year-old child aboard an Alaska Airlines flight was having trouble calming down and sitting properly in his seat with a seatbelt on. The airline kicked the child and his family off the flight before departing from Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle.
Mark Yanchuck was in row 23 with his 3-year-old son, Daniel, on Saturday's flight to Miami. He claimed that his son was acting up because he was tired and cranky. The toddler attempted to get out from the seatbelt and his father held him down, as he told Seattle's Kiro-TV.
Yanchuck's 1-year-old son, Dennis, his wife, Svetlana and her mother were sitting further up front on the plane. Flight attendants asked Mrs. Yanchuck to move and sit with her 3-year-old to try to calm him down.
"When I came, he was just sitting with his seat belt fastened and after two or three minutes I managed to calm him down," said Svetlana Yanchuck.
The airline claimed that the flight attendants spoke to the parents three or four times, asking them to get their son to calm down. At one point, the flight attendants claim that the boy was lying across the seat with his legs dangling.
The pilot took measures into his own hands. After moving about 50 feet, the pilot decide to return to the gate. The family was then asked to remove themselves from the plane.
"I'm like, 'Do we have to?' I said, 'He's fine. He's calm. Do we have to?' He said the pilot made his final decision," said Yanchuck. The entire family, who was on their way to a vacation in the Virgin Islands, was disembarked from the plane.
"It was 23 rows (back). It was pretty embarrassing," said Mark Yanchuck.
"I thought we were treated like criminals," said Svetlana Yanchuck.
The family declined an offer to be booked on another flight. The airlines is now working on issuing them a refund.
This isn't the first incident in which a toddler was booted from a plane.
In February, a 2-year-old and her family were removed from a JetBlue flight when the child refused to wear her seatbelt because she wanted to be held by her mother.
In 2009, Pamela Root and her toddler son were kicked off a Southwest flight because passengers could not hear pre-flight safety announcements. In 2008, a two-year-old autistic child was removed from a flight for crying and screaming uncontrollably.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
