Passenger Sues: FA Woke Him Up

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An Arizona man filed a complaint with police saying a flight attendant “rudely” woke him up by tapping his knee with a magazine.

Kevin Johnson, 37, told Indianapolis Airport police he was sleeping on a chartered Million Air flight as it taxied to the gate, when the flight attendant struck him on the knee to wake him up.

Johnson said he was “rudely interrupted” by the flight attendant, whom he could not identify.

Officer Ricky Seconds wrote in the police report that Johnson “had no physical signs of injury, no complaint of pain and no paralysis from the magazine.”

Really? You’re going to file a police report because a flight attendant used a magazine to nudge you? It might be a different story if he/she repeatedly beat you with the magazine, slapped you across the face multiple times and then tried to break your knees with it, but from the sounds of this report they merely used to it wake you up.

Sure, there are better ways of doing it. I, myself, wouldn’t use a magazine or a menu for that matter to nudge a passenger awake. I always take the soft poke to the shoulder approach, but, would that have landed me in hot water with you? Would you have preferred to sleep and not be disturbed? Because if that’s the case, then maybe that message should have been conveyed to the crew. Although, if you were sleeping and you managed to sleep through a regulatory announcement about bringing your seat forward for a critical phase of flight, well, then, the crew would have to wake you up to ask for your compliance because I’m sure if they just adjusted your seat while you were sleeping you’d probably have a problem with that too.

I’m not quite sure how this situation could have been handled differently, other than not using a magazine, that would have resulted in a happy passenger. I mean, clearly, he was trying to start something over nothing if the police had to specify in their report that the passenger “had no physical signs of injury, no complaint of pain and no paralysis from the magazine.” Of course he didn’t.

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  • http://twitter.com/UnderJetBridge UndertheJetBridge

    You never know, he could’ve gotten a nasty paper cut from the magazine. Maybe he didn’t the upgrade he wanted.

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  • Frank

    solution:  let all passengers deplane, except sleeping passenger.  TURN ON boarding music as loudly as possible or get on the PA and SCREAM, “GET OUT!!!!!!!!!!!”

    • http://upupandagay.com Bobby Laurie

      HAHA How awesome would that be?!

  • Airline Gypsy

    On my trans-continental flight to SFO, a pax told me that I’d walked down the aisle four times and woken him up four times. I apologized. While it is true that I use my hips as an early warning system when I pull the cart up the aisle, I don’t intentionally run into pax. Then I looked at his neighbor across the aisle. He was BIG and protruded into the aisle. As I was trying to avoid the BIG pax, I inadvertently brushed the sleeping pax (who was also leaning into the aisle). A girl can’t win… 

    • http://upupandagay.com Bobby Laurie

      Ugh.. sometimes you can’t win. But I bump into aisle people ALL the time, a bump here — bit of turbulence there.. It comes with sitting in the aisle.