- Spirit Airlines said it removed a family of four from a flight because they refused to wear masks.
- The video of the incident shows the masked parents being instructed to leave while their unmasked child eats.
- The Spirit says that what is not shown is that the parents did not fulfill the mandates of the mask moments before.
- See more stories on the Insider business page.
Spirit Airlines is defending its decision to land a flight because of what it said was a mask violation involving a family.
Monday’s fight from Orlando to Atlantic City delayed more than two hours, passengers were disembarked and the family was allowed to board the flight again.
A video of the incident was posted on Twitter, but the full event is still unclear. In a video, which was widely shared, a father, a pregnant mother and their two children are seen being instructed to get off the plane. In the video, the mother and father wear masks, although the father is seen removing his in some places to speak to the flight attendant. One of the children is sitting on his mother’s lap, without a mask, eating.
“I told you, noncompliance – you will have to go down. I didn’t want to do that,” heard a flight attendant, who appears to be a different person from the one who originally confronted the family, in a video posted by Disclose.TV on twitter. The flight attendant later points to the child on the lap of the woman who is eating, when questioned by both parents that she is not obeying.
In the video, the flight attendant tells the family to leave the plane or, “I’m going to have to get off the plane and call the police.”
—Disclose.tv 🚨 (@disclosetv) April 5, 2021
Federal law requires all passengers over the age of two to wear a mask when they are not eating on board a flight. President Joe Biden signed an executive order in January that required all air travelers to wear masks on planes, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also ordered face masks on various means of transportation, including buses and the subway.
It is unclear the age of the child who does not wear the mask, but in a video of the incident, parents say the child is only a month older than two, as Newsweek reports.
On its website, Spirit Airlines says it applies a mask policy in line with Biden’s executive order and other federal requirements. It requires all travelers to wear facial covers while on board the aircraft and says they can only be removed when passengers are eating, drinking or taking medicine.
Spirit told Insider that the airline ordered the family to leave because the parents were not fulfilling the mask’s mandates, which the company said was not captured on video and came before the widely shared video was filmed.
Spirit says it was a standard protocol in the airline industry to land the entire plane if there was an incident with a passenger. The company also said the couple initially refused to leave, adding that that was why Spirit forced all passengers to leave the plane. Spirit said that if the family had agreed to disembark, the rest of the passengers would have remained on board.
Newsweek reported that, after talking to a supervisor and agreeing to obey, the family left on the same flight.
According to another video from the event, the father in the incident claims that a flight attendant did not board the plane again. Spirit told Insider that the crew was merely replaced, but did not clarify whether that was the standard protocol for scenarios like this.
Orlando police confirmed to Newsweek that they were called.
“Just before noon today, our officers were called in for a general disturbance involving a Spirit Airlines flight scheduled to take off from Orlando International Airport,” a police spokesman told Newsweek. “Upon arrival, the officers saw that the flight was in the middle of landing. Our officers waited while Spirit Airlines solved the problem.”
Workers in the aviation, food and retail sectors were tasked last year to enforce masking mandates among customers, some of whom are unwilling to comply. The use of masks has become widely politicized since March 2020, with some Republicans spreading a narrative that the COVID-19 pandemic is less severe than it appears.