Flight diverted after family complains about flight movie

[norabrie]

I wouldn't love having a questionable movie shown on a flight where I am unable to leave or remove my daughter from the situation. However, I really feel the thing that has a much greater impact on children is the way their parents behave - watching how their parents handle themselves in a situation where things are not going their way is probably going to be much more memorable. I mean, how often do you hear grownups at a family gathering - "Hey remember that time we saw a PG13 movie on an airplane?" Yet "Remember that time Dad FREAKED OUT because they were showing a movie and got the whole plane grounded and homeland security was after us?" Yeah.. that one will be one to remember.

Even when things don't go your way, you have to behave. Things won't always go your way. Your kids need to learn that too, that the world is not going to bend to their every want and desire, and how to handle it when it doesn't.

*Edited, I DO know the difference between they're/there/their!

[Flossie]

Why, why so much hating on the homeless? For the love of God...why????

While it's true that there is a segment of the homeless population who have mental or social issues, I have a story that addresses this. It's long, so feel free to skip it.

My city's library has some homeless people who hang out there during the day. They hang out as a group and usually grab a couple of the bigger tables in the general reading area.

See, we have a Mission here, and the people who seek shelter there have to check in sometime in the late afternoon if they want dinner. If they miss the dinner and they have a good reason they can show up for a place to stay for the night up to 7-8 pm. They're got up at 6 am and get breakfast, then must go to a service. After that, they have to leave for the day so the volunteer staff can clean the dorms. There are separate dorms for the men and women, possibly separate quarters for families.

Anyway, when it's too hot or cold outside, the guests seek out public places where they can get in out of the weather. I first became aware of this one day years ago when I took my kids to the library to attend Story Time and check out some books. One of my daughters (she was about 6 or 7) wandered over to one of the tables where a group of men were sitting. They had newspapers and magazines on the table and one of the magazines caught my daughter's eye. It was a nature magazine that had a frog on the cover and at that time my daughter was fascinated with frogs. The magazine was pushed off to the side so my daughter thought it was OK to take it. I was too far away to stop her, so she picked it up and one of the men at the table got visibly upset. He started muttering and glaring at my daughter while she walked away, not realizing anything was wrong. The other men at the table were trying to calm the upset man down, but he was getting more agitated.

I told my daughter that she didn't ask permission to take the magazine and we'd find her a book on frogs, then returned the magazine to the table and told the table in general that I was sorry that my daughter took it without asking. The upset man seemed even more offended, but the other men smiled and said no problem. After that the upset man glared at me and kept muttering.

I talked to one of the librarians and he clued me in on what was happening. He explained about how the men were there to keep warm, and although this one particular man upset me, he'd never gone beyond muttering and glaring. Sometimes those who have nothing get upset when even a borrowed magazine is just taken away just because they haven't gotten around to reading it yet. I kept me and the kids out of his sight as best as I could, we picked out some books, and then we left. By then the upset man had refocused on his reading. I have to admit that I wasn't comfortable with that experience, but it was a public library, and this man was part of the public. It's hard sometimes to put yourself in another person's shoes, but we should try.

Now that I've gone through all that, I'm about to tie this together. Another time at the same library, I passed by a young man dressed in all the latest fashion and he was watching porn on one of the library's public computers. I'm not sure I'd have noticed but he was making some very suggestive sighing sounds and drew my attention, lol. I look over and see a very well endowed woman lowering herself onto an engorged member. Yikes!

Again, I went to a librarian, and she explained that as a matter of free speech any member of the public was allowed to watch whatever they liked on the library's computers. Plus, the computer he was watching was in a section of the library that housed adult fiction books that most younger kids wouldn't be interested in. I said that I told my kids where I would be and if they came looking for me, they might see the porn. We compromised. I'd go tell my kids to approach me from the far end of the section I was in, thereby avoiding his station. She'd ask the young man to move to a nearby computer that faced a wall. That way, the only way someone could see what he was viewing would be if they came and stood directly behind him.

Guess what, when the librarian went over to talk to him he was masturbating! Penis out and hand action going on. Even the liberal public library couldn't allow that and he was escorted out.

(I still told my kids not to look at other people's computer screens as it was rude. In retrospect, it probably made them look even more. Ahh, kids. We have all been kids, it's surprising how much we as adults forget that.)

[Mecca]

I do not blame the parents for being upset. Watching two hours of Tyler Perry's awful acting would be enough to send me over the edge too. For the record: Alex Cross really is a crap movie. Just awful.

There are several accounts that suggest the father was being a belligerent jerk during this situation. If that is true, I think the father acting like a complete asshole would have a greater negative impact on his children than watching a heavily edited movie on a plane.

[sparkles]

Actually, Im going to bite on the school prayer thing.....when I was a kid, we were expected to pray or stand silently and do the pledge to "one nation under god" in my public school. I was told that I was a bad person because my family didn't go to church. It always pissed me off and seemed by unfair that I had to tolerate that and do those things, to pretend to worship a deity that I don't believe in, just to make other people comfortable. I was the angry one, my parents told me to keep my head down and play along until graduation.

So.....maybe the school prayer thing is 98% about the adults? Children can have beliefs and values too.

Yeah, I'll bite on this one too. The discomfort with school prayer was most definitely NOT restricted to adults. I was still quite young when school prayer was abolished but I have very strong memories of wondering why we were forced to start every school day and every assembly with prayer in general and Christian prayer specifically. Our school had a very significant Jewish population, yet it were totally disregarded. (Not only was prayer Christian only, but each student, Christian, Jewish or otherwise, was assigned, yes, ASSIGNED the task of purchasing and bringing in ornaments for each classroom's Christmas tree.) I, like many of my friends back then, was raised VERY reform Jewish, no strong religious ties but a definite cultural identity, and trust me, even as young children we were quite aware of being excluded.

P.S. I was very young also when I declared myself as an atheist and stopped reciting the pledge, with it's crammed-in One Nation Under God. I was the first to do so and got quite a bit of flack for it. My parents, however, backed up my right to refuse.

[2xx1xy1JD]

I'm not sure when the hell stuff that previous generations of parents have dealt with successfully became Major Crises For Everyone to fret about, "go to the press" about, demand restitution for. When the fuck did everyone get so sensitive? If being out in public is so damned stressful and nightmare-inducing for your Special Snowflake, stay the fuck home. Paying customers don't have to watch Teletubbies on long boring flight just so Annabella and Ryder don't get their Pull Ups in a wad.

This country is kicking out the pussiest kids on the planet these days. It's really depressing.

Being "out in public" doesn't generally involve witnessing violent scenes of rape and murder.

[2xx1xy1JD]

But where does it stop then, and who gets to decide where that line is drawn? You may find murder and rape scenes inappropriate for yourself/your child. Now imagine the Duggars are sitting one row behind you across the aisle, and whatever PG-13-rated defrauding entertainment you're watching on your own device is unnerving them. Do they get to demand that you shut that whole thing down ?

I'm unfamiliar with Alex Cross, but my guess is it probably doesn't open with a scene of gory violence immediately following the announcement of the title of the film, so you probably have between 2-4 minutes to distract your child. I'm willing to bet $5 the parents were too busy fucking around instead of paying attention to their blessings before it was too late and the blessings had already started freaking out. I mean, even horror movies begin all sweet.

P.S. I have to stress that I truly believe the kids had to have been REALLY TRYING to look up to see the screens. I'm 5'2" and if I look directly ahead, all I see is the seatback in front of me; in order to see what's being shown on a shared screen, I have to sit back and readjust my position in my seat to see that high up. I'd imagine a four-year-old would have a slightly harder time than even I.

The Duggars yell "Nike!" when they pass a woman with revealing outfits. If things that you can reasonably expect to see while out in public cause issues, you better have your own way of dealing with it.

Scenes of violent rape and murder are not common in public, unless you are living in a war zone.

[2xx1xy1JD]

I have done a few international and domestic flights in the last few years that were long enough to show movies. The most recent movie I saw on a shared screen was Timothy Green, but I have had a mix of adult and kid/teen movies. However, the individual screens are becoming more common and that makes me really happy, I hate trying to be able to see the shared one (I'm short so like Carla Bruni described, haha). I do think it is within people's rights not to be exposed to content they don't want to see, and I think something like no PG-13 level violence is not an unreasonable request. I think that is something either people are not going to see in everyday life so we shouldn't expect them to be accustomed to seeing it on shared TV screens, *or* is the type of thing people might have seen IRL and been traumatized by. Unfortunately I don't think we are ever going to get universal agreement on what is acceptable, so the individual screens would be the best solution.

And I think there are obnoxious people of all age groups in movie theatres. LOL I don't think making Harry Potter midnight showings 18+, for example, would have helped at all. By the end, most of the people going to the midnight showings were now young adults who had grown up with the books/films. People were rabid trying to get to their seats and cutting in line even though you had to buy tickets in advance so we all knew we'd get in. I don't think I'd willingly deal with that type of craziness again for any other movie or book franchise. Under normal conditions, I've experienced both annoying preteens/teens and adults.

This is just throwing out random ideas. But what about having a specific flight time each day for common destinations that is labeled as "family-friendly". Maybe it's a time of day where people don't tend to do business traveling and they could make sure to have the little pilot pins and provide extra time for boarding, stuff like that. Of course, I would see it as something that is not restricted for other people and kids would be allowed on other flights, this is just one that is specifically dedicated to providing good service to families and a welcoming environment (or at least an awareness that there will be lots of kids on the flight). Customer service has really gone down in airports and on the flights themselves even from what I remember as a kid in the 90s, so maybe what really needs to happen is more customer service training.

Time of day distinctions are not practical.

Flights get delayed and rescheduled all the time. Time is also meaningless when you talk about any longer flight. We've pretty much flown at every hour with our kids - morning flights mean getting up at 4 a.m., afternoon flights mean arriving late at night, and flying overseas usually means sleeping on the plane.

If Disney ever decided to enter the market and run charter flights to their resorts, they could create a family-friendly experience.

My personal pet peeve wrt flying with kids these days is the lack of food and blankets. These used to be free, and you could order special meals. Now, I get to pay $4 for a small can of Pringles, and security regulations prevent me from taking certain things purchased in advance onto the plane with me. During some multi-leg flights, this has been a problem - one time a medical emergency prevented the food service on the longest leg of the trip and delayed us getting off the plane, and we only had 30 seconds to run to the next flight. We ended up eating potato chips for 15 hours. BTW - if anyone ever goes anywhere via New Zealand, do NOT attempt to bring in any form of food at all. They have the most intense bio-security that I have ever seen. They pulled us aside for having dirt on the stroller (although it was nice that they washed it for us) and I had to swear that I was exclusively breastfeeding in order to explain the lack of baby formula.

[HeckBound]

I think I was unclear with my mention of school prayer. I was not referring to kids being put in situations where prayer was enforced upon them - unconstitutionally. I was more referring to the adults who are forever trying to get the 10 Cs posted on the school walls and daily prayers said in front of public school classrooms. Their argument seems to be that kids need this sort of thing and that the Christian kids among them would be oppressed were they denied access to public prayer pretty much constantly.

We had a school south of where I live in SWVA that put up the 10 Cs framed on the school hallway. Someone went to the ACLU, who came in and told them they were willing to bring suit. Well the school hemmed and hawed for a while, then offered to surround the 10cs with other "founding historical documents", like the Dec of Independence and the Constitution, the underlying subtext being that they were all on par level in the founding of the US, which is patently wrong.

Anyway, the ACLU didn't bite and the suit went on. The outcome wasnt' in any doubt, and eventually the school board realized they were looking at two sets of legal fees for a certain loss, and caved. To much hue and cry, of course, among the natives who wrote long letters to the paper about "comunists who want to take are 'murican way of life away from us (insert obligatory Obama comment)".

As for what we see out in "real life"...I'm pretty sure some kids out in the real world got an up-close and personal look at actual genuine real-life violence and gore the other day. There's little way to control what goes on out there, and instead of pretending you can bubblewrap your kid into immunity from it, you're better off teaching them coping skills.

[jaynie]

As for what we see out in "real life"...I'm pretty sure some kids out in the real world got an up-close and personal look at actual genuine real-life violence and gore the other day. There's little way to control what goes on out there, and instead of pretending you can bubblewrap your kid into immunity from it, you're better off teaching them coping skills.

Those kids (and many of the adults) are probably going to need counseling, though, regardless of their coping skills. It's a bit silly to suggest that because violent things happen sometimes, it's totes cool for an airline to show an extremely graphic movie.

I do think the parents reacted very badly, and that their influence is probably worse for the kids than the movie. But there are pretty widely agreed upon standards for what films are appropriate for all age levels and what are not (aka the ratings system). It seems odd that an airline would choose a movie that fell into the "not" category.

I also don't really see how it's an infringement of anyone's personal freedom to show a "safer" movie, either. It's not like you fly places to catch the on-flight film.

[2xx1xy1JD]

As for what we see out in "real life"...I'm pretty sure some kids out in the real world got an up-close and personal look at actual genuine real-life violence and gore the other day. There's little way to control what goes on out there, and instead of pretending you can bubblewrap your kid into immunity from it, you're better off teaching them coping skills.

When something like that happens, it SHOULD be shocking.

If kids are so exposed to violence that they fail to react to a bombing and feel grief, there is something very, very wrong.

[Gil]

Frankly, this doesn't sound like a movie that I would be comfortable watching.

Some choice phrases:

"A man catches on fire."

"Bloody injuries and surroundings are depicted along with numerous dead bodies."

"A character cuts off the fingers of a woman and puts them in a bowl."

"Other depictions of tortured women are seen."

"Picasso is a serial killer that is very brutal. Picasso's death is disturbing."

I don't know that I would have handled this situation in the same way that this family chose to, but I think that it's inappropriate to act as though the parents' concerns about the movie were invalid. I can't imagine what the airline was thinking.

[alba]

My personal pet peeve wrt flying with kids these days is the lack of food and blankets. These used to be free, and you could order special meals. Now, I get to pay $4 for a small can of Pringles, and security regulations prevent me from taking certain things purchased in advance onto the plane with me. During some multi-leg flights, this has been a problem - one time a medical emergency prevented the food service on the longest leg of the trip and delayed us getting off the plane, and we only had 30 seconds to run to the next flight. We ended up eating potato chips for 15 hours. BTW - if anyone ever goes anywhere via New Zealand, do NOT attempt to bring in any form of food at all. They have the most intense bio-security that I have ever seen. They pulled us aside for having dirt on the stroller (although it was nice that they washed it for us) and I had to swear that I was exclusively breastfeeding in order to explain the lack of baby formula.

If you're ever flying to the UK/Western Europe, I highly recommend BA (British Airways). Blankets, pillows, snacks and drinks are all included, and there are about a dozen special meal options. There's also more leg room than a lot of other airlines.

[OnceModestTwiceShy]

I looked up the synopsis of that movie. I would probably personally complain about it being shown on a flight. I don't have children, but that level of violence would make many adults, myself included, extremely uncomfortable and could even be triggering. No reason to show that on an airplane when there are so many films to choose from.

[Patsy]

While it's true that there is a segment of the homeless population who have mental or social issues, I have a story that addresses this. It's long, so feel free to skip it.

My city's library has some homeless people who hang out there during the day. They hang out as a group and usually grab a couple of the bigger tables in the general reading area.

See, we have a Mission here, and the people who seek shelter there have to check in sometime in the late afternoon if they want dinner. If they miss the dinner and they have a good reason they can show up for a place to stay for the night up to 7-8 pm. They're got up at 6 am and get breakfast, then must go to a service. After that, they have to leave for the day so the volunteer staff can clean the dorms. There are separate dorms for the men and women, possibly separate quarters for families.

Anyway, when it's too hot or cold outside, the guests seek out public places where they can get in out of the weather. I first became aware of this one day years ago when I took my kids to the library to attend Story Time and check out some books. One of my daughters (she was about 6 or 7) wandered over to one of the tables where a group of men were sitting. They had newspapers and magazines on the table and one of the magazines caught my daughter's eye. It was a nature magazine that had a frog on the cover and at that time my daughter was fascinated with frogs. The magazine was pushed off to the side so my daughter thought it was OK to take it. I was too far away to stop her, so she picked it up and one of the men at the table got visibly upset. He started muttering and glaring at my daughter while she walked away, not realizing anything was wrong. The other men at the table were trying to calm the upset man down, but he was getting more agitated.

I told my daughter that she didn't ask permission to take the magazine and we'd find her a book on frogs, then returned the magazine to the table and told the table in general that I was sorry that my daughter took it without asking. The upset man seemed even more offended, but the other men smiled and said no problem. After that the upset man glared at me and kept muttering.

I talked to one of the librarians and he clued me in on what was happening. He explained about how the men were there to keep warm, and although this one particular man upset me, he'd never gone beyond muttering and glaring. Sometimes those who have nothing get upset when even a borrowed magazine is just taken away just because they haven't gotten around to reading it yet. I kept me and the kids out of his sight as best as I could, we picked out some books, and then we left. By then the upset man had refocused on his reading. I have to admit that I wasn't comfortable with that experience, but it was a public library, and this man was part of the public. It's hard sometimes to put yourself in another person's shoes, but we should try.

Now that I've gone through all that, I'm about to tie this together. Another time at the same library, I passed by a young man dressed in all the latest fashion and he was watching porn on one of the library's public computers. I'm not sure I'd have noticed but he was making some very suggestive sighing sounds and drew my attention, lol. I look over and see a very well endowed woman lowering herself onto an engorged member. Yikes!

Again, I went to a librarian, and she explained that as a matter of free speech any member of the public was allowed to watch whatever they liked on the library's computers. Plus, the computer he was watching was in a section of the library that housed adult fiction books that most younger kids wouldn't be interested in. I said that I told my kids where I would be and if they came looking for me, they might see the porn. We compromised. I'd go tell my kids to approach me from the far end of the section I was in, thereby avoiding his station. She'd ask the young man to move to a nearby computer that faced a wall. That way, the only way someone could see what he was viewing would be if they came and stood directly behind him.

Guess what, when the librarian went over to talk to him he was masturbating! Penis out and hand action going on. Even the liberal public library couldn't allow that and he was escorted out.

(I still told my kids not to look at other people's computer screens as it was rude. In retrospect, it probably made them look even more. Ahh, kids. We have all been kids, it's surprising how much we as adults forget that.)

Sorry for bumping ancient history, but I kept meaning to address this and forgetting, so I'm doing it now while I remember:

Yeah, you're right. I was being lazy. I wanted to come up with an illustrative example, went "what's a distressing public display? masturbation. when would that happen?" and my brain just filled the blank with stereotypes and other quick associations. It was incorrect and insulting and I apologise. I spend a lot of time in public libraries around scruffy, muttering and clearly sleeping rough people and the worst I ever experience from them is bad smells, whereas I've seen and endured some pretty obnoxious conduct from well-heeled and presumably not homeless (or at the very least not sleeping rough) people.