Popular culture often does us a disservice. For example, I personally have seen more than once or twice in different films and TV series how a brave hero or heroine copes with a person who has fallen into hysterics by simply yelling at them. Loud, brutal, effective. On the screen, yeah.
In real life, of course, everything is quite different, and everything is much more complicated. For example, the user u/GGlazer54, the hero of our story today, having acted approximately as I wrote in the previous paragraph, earned not enthusiastic applause, but the disapproval of many folks around him. And, importantly, the events took place on a plane, during a turbulent flight.
More info: Reddit
The author of the post once was on a flight and another passenger nearby threw a tantrum over an upcoming turbulent zone
Image credits: Pixabay (not the actual photo)
The woman yelled and demanded to be deplaned immediately, and the flight attendant wasn't successful in their attempts to calm her down
Image credits: u/GGlazer54
Finally the author lost it and yelled at the woman himself, urging her to shut up. To no avail...
Image credits: RDNE Stock project(not the actual photo)
Image credits: u/GGlazer54
The author didn't become a savior of the whole flight. Moreover - the flight attendant gave him an icy look too
Image credits: Mohammad Arrahmanur (not the actual photo)
Image credits: u/GGlazer54
The flight attendant ended up calming down the unruly passenger, and our hero just pondered whether he was a jerk here
So, the Original Poster (OP), a 30 year-old man, was once flying on an airplane, and when the crew commander announced on the on-board radio that the aircraft would soon enter a turbulence zone, followed by a request to fasten the seat belts (a fairly standard situation, after all, for the frequent flyers), then one of the passengers nearby threw a real tantrum.
The woman in her late 40s desperately wanted to immediately talk to the pilot, accused the cabin crew of negligence, and demanded to be deplaned immediately (we remind you that the action took place a couple of miles above the ground). The flight attendant routinely tried to calm her down - but, from the author's point of view, completely unsuccessfully.
When the passenger's screams turned into real hysterics, and the kids around her began to unwittingly pick up her cries, the original poster decided that he needed to take the initiative into his own hands. He stood up in his seat and yelled at the passenger, demanding that she shut up immediately. She, of course, did not comply with the demand, but on the contrary, pulled out some kind of ID and immediately accused the OP of disrespecting a doctor.
Now our hero had become “enemy number one” for the passenger, but those around him were also not delighted with his deed. Even the flight attendant, giving the guy an icy look, made another attempt to calm the woman down, taking her somewhere further away. Apparently, they still succeeded, because the flight ended quite successfully. True, while deplaning, that very woman gave the OP another angry look. Apparently, he has now made an obvious enemy in her...
Image credits: Chris Curry (not the actual photo)
Well, passengers are indeed quite often unruly while on flights - at least according to the Federal Aviation Administration, in 2023, 2,075 reports of disruptive passengers from cabin crews were received, in 2022 there were 2,455 such cases, and here's an absolute record a year earlier - as much as 5,973 reports. But should other passengers intervene in such cases?
Definitely not, experts say. “If a fellow passenger is disruptive, the flight attendants will handle that and prefer no interference, unless the situation becomes violent,” The Washington Post quotes Jeff Price, professor of aviation management at Metropolitan State University of Denver. “Otherwise, the involvement of other passengers before a physical altercation (or threat of one), can escalate the situation.”
Moreover, some commenters add to the original post that the passenger in the situation described could well have had a panic attack, and in this case the OP's yelling could have led to disastrous results. "The job of the flight attendant was already hard enough, you just made it worse," one of the commenters wrote. "They have formations on how to handle panic attacks, and yelling is not part of it."
And people in the comments do suspect that the original poster actually, perhaps unconsciously, wanted to get his moment of glory as the savior of the entire flight, but everything went wrong. "How can you make up all of that and not end it with 'and then the whole plane clapped'," someone wrote sarcastically in the comments.
In general, the reaction of commenters to the behavior of both participants in the incident is clearly negative - but the author of the post was obviously way more wrong here. "As it is, all you did is yell at an anxious person and escalated the situation," another commenter concluded. And what do you, our dear readers, think about this? Have you ever found yourself in similar situations, and how did it end in your own case?
Both the experts and the commenters agree that another people shouldn't intervene when a flight attendant tries to calm down a disruptive passenger, so the author was 100% wrong
In moments of in-flight chaos, it's tempting to play the hero, but often, this isn't the best route. As highlighted by the viral incident with our vocal passenger, trying to solve such situations with aggression tends to backfire. This brings to mind the humorous yet insightful reflections on societal pressures depicted in memes. Particularly, the entertaining fables of family-induced career guilt can be very relatable when juxtaposed with real-life airplane anecdotes.
For more on how societal expectations can sometimes clash with personal desires, consider diving into the cultural tales behind popular meme narratives.