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Comment by 4oh9do | Hacker News Reader

I think one of the sore points is that airport workers routinely mistreat customers. True, usually not to the point of physical violence, but plenty of mistreatment regardless. A trite example I just experienced last week: my flight was cancelled, so I stood in a line along with everyone to get rebooked. By the time I got to the counter at the gate, the agent said I had to go to the main ticketing desk in departures to rebook. I asked why the dozens of people in front of me got to rebook right here at the counter. The agent then just acted like I was not there and turned around and started casually chatting to the other staff there. That kind of rudeness happens all the time, and it is precisely what leads to escalations.

The point is that treating staff with disrespect is certainly not justified, but neither is it out of the blue, more often than not it is reciprocal behavior. Flyers are treated like rubbish by airline staff.

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I think it’s true that there is some amount of dehumanization on both ends as a coping mechanism. But we cannot equivocate some casual dehumanization on the part of staff with actual physical abuse or endangering the lives of hundreds of people - those are two entirely different things and shouldn’t even be discussed in the same context as one justifying the other.

I didn't mean to equate the two (violence and rudeness), I was just making the connection that the one leads to escalation of the other. I suspect it's not as if a passenger just runs up to an airline staff member and punches them, a propos of nothing, out of thin air. What I can see as a much more likely scenario is that the staffer acts in a manner the customer doesn't like, the customer curses at them for it, the staffer yells at them, etc. And this can be minimized by offering way more customer service training than it seems like most airlines have. I fly very frequently, weekly usually. And I see and experience absurdly unnecessary rudeness all the time. Another, relatively minor, example from a few weeks ago: when a plane landed, a woman stood up while the seatbelt light was still on. The male flight attendant snarled at her "SIT BACK DOWN, RIGHT DAMN NOW!". Screaming and cursing at customers is not acceptable, and again it doesn't justify escalation, but it certainly creates the breeding ground for it.

I don’t think it’s fair to be treated like cattle on domestic airline flights. Nobody does. But just because I’m treated like disposable waste sometimes doesn’t in any way entitle or justify me to endanger or abuse employees or other flyers. As a sibling comment mentioned, flying is an extremely regulated and protected practice that has a lot of rules. And rest assured, if those rules exist, those rules usually exist because someone paid for them in blood before they became a rule.

I’m not a professional flyer by any means - but I have flown many, many miles both domestic in the States and internationally. I can’t say that you didn’t experience that behavior from a flight attendant - I could absolutely see a flight attendant losing their cool with an uncooperative customer like that - but after having flown thousands of hours both domestic and international I can genuinely say that the situation you describe has never happened to me on either the flyer or employee side - so I’m led to conclude that it must be pretty rare.

There’s a safety aspect that the flight attendants are responsible for at play here. They’re not just on the plane to push the beverage and snack carts. I’ve seen people getting up and into the overhead bins before we left the taxiway. I don’t know what goes through passengers’ heads, but I can see a firm command from a FA being appropriate in some circumstances.

Exactly. People have it in their minds that flight attendants are like waitresses of the sky, there to serve them. They are, in fact, part of the flight crew and have broad authority over the operation of the flight and on flight safety. The FAR is pretty clear about the role of an airplane's flight crew and consequences for interfering with that role.

Also, the fact that some people treat waitresses and service workers as punching bags that are "beneath them" socially, is a separate but related problem here.

Maybe people in the US just routinely treat each other as garbage? At least it seems like staff and customer are just as bad from these comments.

I’ve never really experienced anything like it.

The casual disregard some US visitors have for staff anywhere is appalling.

Yup, and it has gotten much worse during the pandemic. I too have dealt with crazy rude airline staff like this. Not to mention some of the airlines in general are just dropping the ball with their service.

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