Yeah, recently in Chicago one party, accusing another party of stealing his customers, shot him. Some people settle disputes without lawyers.

> while the flight attendant could have done a better job de-escalating …
The FA clearly should have apologized. That is not de-escalation, that is human decency.

Instead the FA did:
> …[T]he orginal attendant that pushed my wife leaning over to her and openly stating that yes, he did push her, he needed to get by… what was the fuss?

What I read in this is, the FA hung over the person (asserting dominance) and said, yes I bumped you, I don’t think it was that bad, so get over it – and I am the FA so there is nothing you can do about it anyway.

What I see is the FA chose to provoked the passenger. De-escalation may be optional, but provoking a passenger is a big problem.

This reflects poorly on the training provided by the airline and its procedures. If a passenger is this upset the procedure should be that another FA addresses the situation.

It would be interesting to hear from the airline and/or FA and what the emergency they were responding to that required them to nearly knock someone over. Handling emergencies is part of the job. It does not excuse treating people with dignity. If it was not an emergency, the FA should be terminated. If it was a real emergency, the FA should get mandatory training on how to keep calm when dealing with multiple situations and keep separate things separate.

WRT the husband.
I agree. Priorities are off. Not getting of the plane with his wife is unacceptable – he is certainly in the dog house.

Should he book a flight with the airline to get status. No. He should write to the CEO of the airline and if executive trouble shooter of the airline does not respond, he should cease flying with the airline and take their complaint to their elected officials – particularly if the airline has a monopoly.

My wife is Finnish, and has also worked for 20 years in Sweden. She asked me why in the U.S. people are so litigious. I agreed, but mitigated it by saying that companies often just ignore or say no to their customers when there is a problem.

She they told me about something that happened to her in Sweden. She had a problem with her car. The dealer refused to fix it on their kroner. BUT, and here is the big BUT, in Sweden, as in other Nordic countries, when a customer makes a complaint, and gets no satisfactory response, you can refer the problem to a consumer watchdog in Sweden. You see, they have a law that in such a case, the customer is always right; and it is up to the company to prove negligence on the customer’s part. In most cases they cannot; and must make the proper restitution.

This law has been in effect for many years, to the satisfaction of both the companies and its consumers. No shouting, no threat of lawsuit, and it is resolved promptly. In my wife’s case, they had to give her a new car.

But the Americanization of Sweden in particular is having cultural consequences in various ways, and it probably showed up in this deplaning incident.

Given SAS has a near monopoly on a lot of non-stop routes to and from the SAS hub airports, a very frequent flyer on any such routes or who will start/end a lot of trips at SAS hubs could be a completely rational actor in wanting to save money this way. It could also explain why the person wanted to remain on the flight despite the person’s wife being booted — it could be about the money.