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By Rachael O'Connor
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A woman determined not to let a mother and child "steal" the seats assigned to herself and her husband on a flight took things into her own hands in dramatic fashion.
Reddit user u/Hungry_Ad_7627 took to the r/EntitledPeople thread on July 12, and she began by saying she loves reading stories about seat stealers getting their comeuppance and expected it would eventually happen to her as she travels for work.
"Well, it finally happened and it was fun," she wrote.
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And while Redditors heaped praise on the woman for how she handled a mother and her young son sitting in their seats, etiquette expert Jo Hayes told Newsweek that, in her opinion, her reaction was in "very poor form."
In her post, the woman says she saw a mother and her "maybe 11 or 12"-year-old son sitting in the seats assigned to them, looking at their phones.
When she told them they were sitting in her and her husband's seats, the mother claimed the stewardess told her they could sit there as they initially weren't seated together.
The woman, who described herself as usually a "people pleaser," said she hadn't gotten much sleep and was "not in the mood". So she smiled and told her she and her husband had paid for the seats and would like to sit there.
Still smiling, the mother suggested they take the seats behind them as they were "already settled," but the woman was having none of it, since they could then be sitting in someone else's assigned seats.
And so she told the mother and her son: "I would like the police to be able to identify our bodies by seat number in case the plane crashes and our families want to bury our remains."
Hayes, founder of EtiquetteExpert.Org, told Newsweek: "She was in the right, in requesting that the mother and child move from the seats assigned to her and her husband, but she went about it the wrong way."
"It was not necessary to use the plane crash example, especially in the presence of an 11-year-old child," she went on.
The woman described the child's reaction in her post as "delicious," saying he had been on his phone the whole time but at this point he "shoots up in shock."
And Hayes noted her "apparent glee in seeing his shocked face," calling it "very poor form."
"That is supremely uncharitable behavior. No adult should be delighting in shocking a child in such a way," she said.
The mother, "bewildered," eventually moved, while the woman kept "smiling sweetly" and then told her husband what happened, writing: "We laughed and I'm pretty sure the mom heard, or I hope so."
Hayes said: "The woman laughing afterwards, with her husband, and 'hoping' that the woman heard them, is also poor form, and demonstrates poor manners.
"The best way to handle this situation would have been to remain assertive in her
insistence that the woman and her child move seats—to remain kind, calm and civil, remember, 'be clear, but kind'—and the situation would have resolved itself.
"The stewardess would have eventually intervened, in favor of the woman and husband, no doubt, as these were their assigned seats, if the mother and child refused to move," she said.
Reddit users, however, had an entirely different stance, with u/Hungry_Ad_7627's post garnering 15,000 upvotes and hundreds of comments, many praising her for how she handled it. Newsweek could not verify the details of the case.
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One wrote: "This really was a great one, thank you for sharing it. I work in aviation and this is what I need to hear at the end of a long week. People learning lessons."
Another declared: "I am pretty positive that seat bandits are the same people who park in handicap spots, drive in the shoulder to skip traffic, and don't hold the door for other people. These are the people that ruin polite society and they should be banished and shamed."
"I can't stand people that force their problems on others," another wrote about the mother and son, and one said of the woman's plane crash example: "That was brilliant though morbid and I love it."
And as one put it: "Best response ever."
Scheduled commercial air travel is among the safest modes of transportation available, according to the National Safety Council (NSC), which stated the lifetime odds of dying as a plane passenger in the United States is too small to calculate.
In 2022, major airlines in the U.S. experienced zero onboard fatalities, with a fatal accident rate of 0.0 per 100,000 hours.
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