A troubling incident that occurred on a Ryanair flight from Barcelona to London is making the rounds online, getting the Scottish budget operator in hot waters over how it handled the situation.
Footage of the incident was captured by David Lawrence and posted to his social media and YouTube account. He was on flight FR9015 and even tried to intervene to defuse the situation, but flight attendants didn’t pay him any attention.
You can see the video at the bottom of the page. The incident started when an elderly black woman was accompanied by her daughter to her seat, which happened to be near a man who didn’t want her to be sitting there – for the sole reason that she was black.
The man, furious beyond any reasonable explanation, called the woman an “ugly black bastard” and a “stupid ugly cow,” and yelled at her daughter when she tried to reason with him to leave her alone because she was “disabled.” He didn’t care, he informed her, and then proceeded to insult the elderly woman some more.
At one point, a flight attendant came to tell the woman she could move to another seat if she wanted to, which she initially refused. This is when the man started to threaten her directly. “I’ll tell you this,” he told her. “If you don’t go to another seat, I’ll put you into another seat.”
Eventually, another passenger cut in to force the man to stop insulting the poor woman, and the flight attendant moved her to a seat near her daughter. Meanwhile, Lawrence can be heard saying that the flight attendant should kick the racist old man off the plane, and not move the woman instead.
And this is precisely why Ryanair is now coming under heavy fire online: under any other circumstance, any other flight operator would have kicked off the passenger who caused the trouble, and not allow them to keep their seat and move somebody else around.
As of the time of writing, no arrests into this incident have been made, and Ryanair tells Huffington Post that the matter is in the hands of the police. They’re refusing to further comment on it, though they’re clearly responsible for not handling this the appropriate way.
The video has been viewed over 1 million times on Facebook alone. This kind of exposure for a budget operator can’t be a good thing, so they might want to reconsider their “no comment” stance.
Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends. Full profile
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