A flight attendant on a Spirit Airlines flight Monday night called the police on a black couple and ultimately kicked six black passengers off the plane for protesting their treatment.
The flight attendant asked the couple to move seats, but the passengers insisted they had done nothing wrong and that the seats were double-booked. According to a witness interviewed by CBS Los Angeles, the man eventually got up to move, but the flight attendant, who is white, said something rude. The man retorted, “I’m not talking to you, you don’t talk to me,” according to the witness. The flight attendant then told him he was going to have to get off the plane and called the police to report him as a threat. Other travelers protested the man’s treatment, so the attendant asked the police to escort them off the plane as well, leaving them behind in Los Angeles as the flight took off for Dallas.
The airline said the passengers were kicked off because they were being “disruptive.” But one of the women who was kicked off pointed out that they were not the only people who were part of the discussion, yet all six people removed from the plane were black. Other passengers told reporters once the flight had landed that the people who had been kicked off the plane were indeed being disruptive.
Spirit Airlines has been accused of discrimination before, also concerning confusion over a double-booked seat. Last year, a passenger told The Root she had seen the airline deny a black man a premium seat he had purchased because a white man was sitting in it. Though the black man displayed the correct seat on his boarding pass, a flight attendant sent him to the back of the plane. Spirit responded to the allegations, saying everything was fine until a woman became “disruptive” by arguing that the treatment of the man was racist. “Duplicate seats on airlines are rare but occasionally happen,” Spirit Airlines explained at the time.