A woman says she feared she would be arrested after a Frontier Airlines gate agent tried to boot her from a flight after the low-cost carrier accidentally gave her seat to a standby passenger after she had already boarded the plane.
Taking to the social media platform Reddit, the 40-year-old woman explained in detail how she was initially accused of ‘sneaking’ onboard the plane despite having a boarding pass and clearing the gate agents when her group was called.
I Feared Frontier Would Have Me Arrested for Their Mistake and Violation of FAA Regulations
byu/ProfessionalDrive171 infrontierairlines
The incident occurred in Philadelphia while the woman was trying to board a flight to Orlando in order to visit her sister, who had just given birth.
“When the boarding was nearly complete, a gate agent boarded the plane, approached me, and asked to see my boarding pass. Upon producing the boarding pass, the gate agent said I was not on the manifest and accused me of sneaking onto the plane,” the woman, who goes by the username ProfessionalDrive171 explained.
“I later learned that my seat had somehow been given to a passenger waiting to fly standby,” the post continued. “The agent then said that I needed to leave the plane. When I questioned this, she stated that I would be forced off the plane if I did not comply.”
Fearing that she might be arrested if she didn’t relinquish her seat, the woman reluctantly got all her stuff together and exited the plane before returning to the terminal building.
It was at this point, however, that the incident took a strange turn of events as the other gate agent working the flight immediately realized that their colleague may have broken Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations by offloading a passenger without a proper reason.
As the woman explains, the Department of Transportation says that passengers who have already been accepted for travel and have taken their seats can only be booted from a flight in a limited number of circumstances – such as for safety reasons or if they are being unruly.
“She radioed the first agent to hold the flight and led me back down the bridge. I was in tears as the agents argued amongst themselves and with the standby passenger, holding up the departure of the flight,” the woman explained.
In the end, it appears that the woman’s original seatmate, who had heard about her travel plans, voluntarily gave up her seat so that the woman could travel to Florida to see her sister and her new baby.
The woman ended up ‘tearfully’ walking back to her seat while all the other passengers stared at her before later complaining to Frontier about what had happened.
“To date, I have been offered 10,000 miles on Frontier for this ordeal, which amounts to approximately a mere $20 off a future flight,” the woman said. In correspondence to the woman, the airline referred to the incident as a “lack of professionalism.”
Although it is legal for airlines to involuntarily bump passengers from an oversold flight, they must first ask for volunteers and will normally offer incentives such as future travel vouchers to entice people with flexible travel plans to give up their seats.
The DOT notes that airlines cannot involuntarily bump someone from a flight if they have checked in before the window closes and have shown their paper boarding pass or scanned their electronic boarding pass at the gate.
At this point, gate agents only have the power to remove someone from a flight if their removal is “due to a safety, security, or health risk, or due to a behavior that is considered obscene, disruptive, or otherwise unlawful.”
