(CNN) — A New York high school senior class and an airline agree on one thing: 101 students and eight chaperones were kicked off an early-morning flight from New York to Atlanta on Monday.
From there, the accounts diverge.
Southwest Airlines said the group of “non-compliant passengers” would not stay seated, and some were using their mobile devices. When the students failed to comply with requests from the flight crew, including the captain, they were asked to leave the plane, delaying the AirTran flight for 45 minutes, said Southwest spokesman Brad Hawkins.
Southwest Airlines acquired AirTran in a deal announced three years ago.
Students and chaperones from Yeshivah of Flatbush, a private, Orthodox Jewish high school in Brooklyn, said the flight crew overreacted to the youths who were looking forward to visiting Six Flags and rafting, among other activities.
“It blew out of proportion. It was a mountain out of a molehill,” said teacher Marian Wielgus, one of the chaperones.
According to Wielgus, some students may have had to be told twice to sit down or turn off their phones, but everyone listened.
“They certainly did not do what the stewardess was claiming they did,” she said. “That’s what was so bizarre.”
Wielgus said the flight attendants were “nasty,” “overreacting” and “created an incident when there didn’t have to be one.”
According to Southwest Airlines, the group violated safety regulations.
Wielgus said she would understand if individual students who were not complying had been asked to leave, but she objected to the collective punishment.
Wielgus said a “small group” of students in the back of the aircraft were chatty, but that did not warrant the flight crew to force an entire group of 109 people off the plane.
“It was so ugly,” she said.
Rabbi Joseph Beyda, another chaperone, said none of the students on the plane was particularly loud or disruptive. And when he saw that the flight attendant was flustered and had asked students to leave, he asked which kids were causing issues and offered to help, but she refused.
“They just simply said ‘get off the plane,'” Beyda said.
Student Jonathan Zehavi said he felt they were targeted because they are an identifiably Jewish group.
“They treated us like we were terrorists; I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m not someone to make these kinds of statements,” Zehavi said. “I think if it was a group of non-religious kids, the air stewardess wouldn’t have dared to kick them off.”
Zehavi said Southwest Airlines is attempting to cover up an unprofessional and rash decision by saying their group was not cooperating with the crew, when in fact they were, he said.
“It was 4 o’clock in the morning. The last thing any of us wanted to do was get up and make a mess,” Zehavi said.
Another student in the group, Michael Mamiye, said he was one of the first to be kicked off the plane. He said a flight attendant did not give him a chance to turn off his cell phone before asking him to “get off the plane.”
The same flight attendant then told the captain that the students were “making trouble” and not turning off their phones. The captain didn’t come out of the cockpit until the last second when he asked the group to leave, Mamiye said.
According to Mamiye, he and his classmates were quiet and sitting down as they were told. And when they were asked to leave, they left in a respectful and orderly fashion.
“We were more behaved than kids should be,” he said.
Both Beyda and Mamiye said the airline’s customer service did their best to accommodate the group by getting them on the next available flights. But the group had to be split up — some had connecting flights in Milwaukee — and they were in transit for a total of 12 hours, Mamiye said.
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