A woman who boarded a United Airlines flight to Chicago last month was removed from the plane before it departed Baltimore after staffers refused her demand to move a cat seated nearby, it was reported on Thursday.
Donna Wiegel boarded a flight in Baltimore bound for Chicago on the afternoon of March 4 of this year, according to NBC Chicago.
All was fine until Wiegel noticed that a fellow passenger at the gate was boarding with her cat.
Wiegel notified airline staff that she needed to be seated at a distance from the cat due to health reasons.
‘I have a lot of respiratory problems and asthma,’ she said.
‘And cats are a trigger that I have to avoid at all costs.’
After boarding, Wiegel says that the woman with the cat was seated just a few rows away.
‘I said, “Oh, that is way too close”,’ she said.
So the flight attendants told her to swap with another passenger in the back of the plane.
We can’t move the cat,’ she says she was told.
After Wiegel swapped seats with another passenger, as she had been told, she was then confronted by three crew United crew members.
‘They said you’ll have to come with us – the crew is not comfortable having you on the flight,’ she recalled.
‘I’ve never been kicked off a plane, and I was just so stunned that this would happen to me.’
When she reached the gate area, she was met by TSA agents.
Airline officials told her that she was removed because they feared she would have a medical emergency on the flight.
Wiegel said that the removal from the plane and the treatment she received from United personnel caused her distress.
‘You know, I’m hyperventilating at this point,’ she said. ‘Almost in a full blown asthma attack.’
After she was taken off the flight, United arranged to have her driven from the airport in Baltimore to Washington Dulles, where she was put on a United flight to Chicago at 10:30pm – five hours after she was supposed to depart.
Source: United removed asthmatic woman from flight because of cat | Daily Mail Online
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