It is billed as the video which has the Internet "legitimately divided," as if the Internet is usually illegitimately divided: Wendi Williams was traveling from New Orleans to Charlotte on an American Eagle flight operated by American Airlines on Jan. 31st when she got into an argument with the man sitting behind her. The man was sitting in the last row of the plane, and could not lean his chair back as a result. Williams did lean her chair back, and the man proceeded to punch at her seat in protest, as was captured in the clip below.
“Here’s a great jackhole! He was angry that I reclined my seat and punched it about 9 times – HARD, at which point I began videoing him, and he resigned to this behavior,” Williams tweeted. "The other jackhole is the American Air flight attendant who reprimanded me and offered him rum!" She went on to tweet more details about the incident: "The man asked me, with an attitude, to put my seat up because he was eating. I did. I then reclined it again when he was finished. At that point, he started hammering away at me. That’s when I started videoing and tried to call the FA."
She added that as a result of the altercation, she "lost time at work, had to visit a doctor, got x-rays, and have has horrible headaches for a week." After speaking to American Airlines about it, she tweeted that she would be contacting the FBI in order "to press charges against the 'man' who mistook me for a punching bag."
Everybody has an opinion on who was more in the wrong here: was it Williams for reclining in the first place, knowing the man had very little room and no ability to recline himself? Was it the man for aggressively punching her seat in a childlike temper tantrum? Was it the flight attendant for not better intervening and deescalating the situation? Was it the Wright Brothers for cursing us with the gift of flight?
According to Delta CEO Ed Bastian, who noted that he personally does not recline his seat on flights (although...what are the chances that the Delta CEO even flies economy?), fliers should ask permission before reclining. “The proper thing to do is, if you’re going to recline into somebody, you ask if it’s OK first,” he said on CNBC. The Washington Post wrote a guide to airplane reclining last year, which they called "one of the touchiest subjects in all of air travel." In their estimation, you shouldn't recline "when you hear the person behind you beg for mercy." (Back in 2016, when Sen. Chuck Schumer announced that he would be introducing an amendment to an FAA funding bill that would require airlines to provide more space, we wrote our own guide to reclining.)
Most people seem to agree that at the very least, regardless of how the argument started or what the most polite thing would have been, the man was decidedly in the wrong for punching Williams' seat. As Slate put it, there are plenty more ways to passive-aggressively express your frustrations in this type of situation that could not be mistaken for assault. And there is no doubt, as Anthony Atamanuik noted, that while there are a lot of elements of the story we still don't know, people on the Internet were quick to attack Williams: "to attack the woman and sympathize with the man. I think that says a lot about our misogynistic tendencies online."
Having said all that, it is abundantly clear who the real villain of this saga is: it's the monsters who design airplane cabins to maximize profits. Legroom has been slowly but surely taken away from flights over the last two decades. “In the early 2000s, rows in economy used to be 34 inches (86 centimeters) to 35 inches apart; now 30 to 31 inches is typical, though 28 inches can be found on short flights,” Time reported in 2019. “Seats have narrowed, too, from about 18.5 inches to 17 inches on average.” Airline companies have done everything they can to make air travel more miserable and cram more people into smaller spaces. Upset about reclining seats, or lack thereof? Just be grateful you even have a seat. They don't even charge extra for it! (Yet...)
Make no mistake: for every feel-good "impromptu baby shower" story, there are ten more stories about airlines blatantly discriminating against passengers or literally everything Spirit Airlines does. And there are always something worse things right around the corner, like the dreaded Flex Lounge seating we wrote about last month. It's a daring new form of seating in which your legs literally meld with the legs of the person sitting before you as you lock eyes for hours inside the tightly enclosed space. At least instead of punching people in the back of the chair, you'll be able to do it to their faces.
"Flex Lounge"
