Former Sen. Al D'Amato was kicked off a JetBlue flight on Monday for complaining about the way flight staff was handling a plane delay, The Hill reports, eliciting boos from passengers.
D'Amato was flying from Fort Lauderdale to New York to see an ailing friend, his consulting firm told CNN. The flight was delayed, in part, because staff needed to re-distribute the weight of the plane. Some passengers wouldn't comply and the captain "wasn't doing anything," passenger Layla Delarmelina told CNN.
D'Amato confronted the people who refused and called them idiots, according to Delarmelina. He also said 'the captain needed to grow some balls.'
After the flight staff told D'Amato to deplane, some passengers started to boo the staff. One piped up and said "What happened to freedom of speech?"
D'Amato tried to rally passengers to leave with him.
"I'm making an appeal to all you people: Stand up to what's right and walk out with me," D'Amato says in a video posted on Facebook by passenger Jacqueline Galante. "If you don't, then what do you stand up for?"
D'Amato's firm said JetBlue apologized for "overreacting," and also said D'Amato apologized for "speaking his mind at a time when he clearly had left his patience at the gate."
JetBlue spokesman Morgan Johnston told CNN that "the decision to remove a customer from a flight is not taken lightly. If a customer is causing a conflict on the aircraft, it is standard procedure to ask the customer to deplane, especially if the crew feels the situation runs a risk of escalation in-flight."
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