Delta Removes 5 Passengers From Plane Because Flight Attendant Felt ‘Unsafe’

A New York City DJ, Robyn “DJ Reborn” Rodgers, uploaded a series of videos on Instagram on Wednesday, accusing Delta Air Lines of kicking her and four other passengers off a flight Saturday due to an incident that was racially motivated.

The passengers who were kicked off Delta Flight 4527 were Rodgers, an African-American woman, Elena (last name not known), a Latina woman, photographer Ryan Miller, an unidentified man and his son.

It all started when one of the flight attendants on the plane, came over to Rodgers and asked her to put her phone on “flight mode” before the aircraft, which had begun taxing on the tarmac of Fort Wayne International Airport, was about to take off.

“As I was swiping to it the attendant menacingly stood over me with her arms folded waiting for me to do it. I told her, ‘I know how to turn on airplane mode, you don’t have to stand over me.’ She became agitated and said ‘If you’re gonna act like that we can go back to the gate and you can get off,’” Rodgers wrote in a long caption that went up with her social media uploads.

After putting her phone in the correct mode, Rodgers held up her device for the attendant to check out. Satisfied that Rodgers had followed her orders, the flight attendant stormed off from there only to return a few minutes later and accuse the former of deliberately disobeying her order despite repeated requests. Although Rodgers claimed the attendant told her only once to turn on the flight mode, the crew member informed her that she was ordering the flight to turn around and go back to the gate.

“I then asked her, ‘What can we do to rectify this so that we can all go?’ She said ‘You can comply’ and I repeated that I had and she argued I did not,” Rodgers wrote.

That is when Miller, who was sitting behind her, spoke up, saying that he bore witness to the fact that Rodgers had complied. The flight attendant then threatened to throw him off the flight along with Rodgers.

Next, Elena, seated two rows ahead, “politely asked the flight attendant to sit down so that we could fly" and the attendant snapped at her.

Meanwhile, the plane had already gone back to the gate and a police officer was called onboard. Then the five people were escorted off the plane, although it is not clear what the fourth man and his child did to warrant their removal.

Rodgers added that the flight in question was supposed to be the last plane out of Indiana, which meant that the five of them were stuck there till the morning “with no place to stay as @delta refused to put any of us, including the man with the child, in a hotel.” She also mentioned that Elena was rushing back to Texas for her son’s heart surgery, which might have ended up missing due to the incident.

“I’m from Texas, where am I going to go?” Elena is heard asking the airport officials, in one of the videos. “So you throw people on the street? That’s what you do?” Since Delta did not pay for any of the accommodations, Rodgers said that the unidentified passenger, who was removed, and his mother paid for Elena’s hotel booking.

Many Twitter users stood up in support of Rodgers:

“I have filed a formal complaint with @delta but haven’t heard back from them. I requested the attendant’s name but the staff at the airport wouldn’t disclose it,” she wrote. “The attendant used the term with me ‘zero tolerance’ which to my knowledge is not an airline term but I have heard it wielded in a certain administration…just an interesting detail.”

Furthermore, she said that according to her, the flight attendant’s reaction might have been racially motivated. She came to the conclusion following an explanation given by one of the airport staff – whom Rodger recorded for evidence in one of the videos – that the “flight attendant didn’t feel safe … she felt uncomfortable, unsafe, because you guys, to her, she didn’t feel that you guys were listening to her, she didn’t feel safe.”

“It was a traumatic experience and we have all seen videos of Black people, and POC being harmed or killed behind an unnecessary escalation of events instigated by an irrational, petty person. I did NOTHING wrong and having an officer with a gun directed to ‘take me’ is a psychological terror because we don’t always survive that. This abuse of position and disregard for people’s basic humanity by @delta should not be tolerated,” Rodgers wrote.

She also called on the people’s help to identify the flight attendant seen in the video and photo uploaded by her.

Although Delta Air Lines has not put out an official statement regarding the incident, the company replied to a Twitter user who rebuked the flight attendant for abusing her power, tweeting: “Our employees reflect our culture of treating all people with dignity and respect, and if we aren’t doing that, we aren’t doing our job. We’re looking into it now. ”