Girl booted for coughing too loudly on plane

[Lise]

Yeah. Booted her off for coughing and hacking too much. I can understand if you get kicked off for being under the influence of alcohol but to be kicked off for something like this is poor judgement.

   [H3]Girl, 16, kicked off plane for coughing [/H3] [P class=timeStamp]Updated Fri. Mar. 30 2007 12:15 PM ET

 [P class=storyAttributes]Associated Press

 [!-- dateline --]HONOLULU [!-- /dateline --]-- A 16-year-old girl who caught a cold during a school trip to New York was kicked off her flight home because she was coughing.

 Rachel Collier was removed from the Continental Airlines plane as it was about to leave Newark, N.J., for Honolulu earlier this week. She had fallen asleep after boarding the plane with about three dozen classmates and woke up coughing and gasping for breath as it was about to take off.

 "Everyone was looking at me," she said. "I couldn't talk because I lost my voice coughing so much. I was panicking."

 The flight attendants gave her water, and a doctor on the flight said she would be OK to make the 10-hour flight. But the captain returned the aircraft to the gate to drop off the girl and one of her teachers.

 Rachel said she started crying when the captain told her to leave. She and the teacher finally made it home the next day.

 

 [FONT size=1]More: [/FONT][A href="http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070330/cough_plane_070330/20070330?hub=Health"][FONT size=1]http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070330/cough_plane_070330/20070330?hub=Health[/FONT][/A]

[Trollio]

[span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(128, 0, 0);"] Lise wrote:[/span][br style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(128, 0, 0);"][span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(128, 0, 0);"]Yeah. Booted her off for coughing and hacking too much. I can understand if you get kicked off for being under the influence of alcohol but to be kicked off for something like this is poor judgement.[/span]

Maybe. But if she was panicking and had trouble getting air, maybe it wasn't such a bad idea. Even if a doctor looked at her, it's hard to know what someone has going on in their lungs. And it was cheaper for the plane to head back after takeoff than to do a full landing mid-flight if things should have gotten worse.

I know that when I'm flying sometimes, it seems hard to get air on the plane without having a cold. It does seem to have been embarrassing for her, and unnecessary in the end, but I'd be more concerned if the pilot adamantly refused to land, or pay attention to passenger needs, as they are far more likely to do.

 

[P.C.]

Good points Trollio.  I wonder if that isn't the medias' way of inciting a reaction, (which happens now and then....lol) by using the words "kicked off".  Is this a matter of semantics ?

  It makes me wonder how the story would have gone if another choice of words were used.  

[arkady]

 Her coughing may have not been the only annoyance. She may have been snoring loudly before she awoke.