Several students were kicked off a flight from New York to Atlanta on Monday. More than 100 students and eight chaperones from an Orthodox Jewish high school were kicked off an early morning AirTran flight.
"We take this matter seriously and have started our own investigation," said a statement released Tuesday by Rabbi Seth Linfield, executive director of the Yeshiva of Flatbush school in Brooklyn, NY. "Preliminarily, it does not appear that the action taken by the flight crew was justified."
However the airline claims they were correct in their decision, Southwest, which owns AirTrain said the children, or "non-compliant passengers" wouldn't sit in their seats and some were using their cell phones when they were asked to turn them off. Since the students wouldn't listen to the flight crew or captain's requests, they were asked to get off the plane. The incident caused the flight to be delayed for 45 minutes, CNN reports.
The students and chaperones said the airline overreacted. They were on their way to Six Flags and to enjoy activities like rafting as part of the trip.
"It blew out of proportion. It was a mountain out of a molehill," teacher and chaperone Marian Wielgus told CNN.
Wielgus claims that a few students were one once or twice to sit down and turn off their devices and she says that all of the students listened to the request.
"They certainly did not do what the stewardess was claiming they did," she said. "That's what was so bizarre." She called the flight attendants "nasty" and said they "created an incident when there didn't have to be one."
She said that a few students were talking too much, but she doesn't think it was fair to have the entire group of 109 people removed from the plane. Southwest claims the group violated safety regulations.
According to chaperone Rabbi Joseph Beyda, none of the students were particularly out of hand and he claims that he asked the flight attendant which students is particular were causing problems and he offered to help, but she wouldn't respond.
"They just simply said 'get off the plane,'" Beyda said.
Student Jonathan Zehavi thinks the airline targeted them because they were Jewish.
"They treated us like we were terrorists; I've never seen anything like it. I'm not someone to make these kinds of statements," Zehavi told CNN. "I think if it was a group of non-religious kids, the air stewardess wouldn't have dared to kick them off."
Zehavi believes Southwest is trying to cover up their bad decision by kicked off the entire group, saying that they weren't cooperating.
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