First Class Cabin Kicks Mom And Crying Baby To Back Of Plane

Family kicked out of first class because of crying baby

No one likes flying with a crying baby. No one. Not the passengers, not the flight crew, and, most of all, not the baby’s parents. Usually, when a parent comes on board with a baby there are mumbles and eye-rolling as the good people of air travel try to make the parents feel as bad as possible about not being able to reason with their three-month-old. But earlier this week, on a Delta flight from New York City to Los Angeles, it moved from passive-aggressive b.s. to a full-on exile when first-class passengers had a woman kicked to the back of the plane because her baby was crying.

Fashion blogger Arielle Noa Charnes and her husband were flying for the first time with their baby, a bucket-load of cheeks named Ruby. That info alone should put every parent firmly on the Charnes’ side — it’s hard enough to fly with a baby, but to make it a cross-country flight and your first time doing it? Egad. How long is the drive from New York to California? 40 hours? Yeesh. It’s like choosing between projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea — there’s no win, so you might as well pick the one that ends the quickest.

Charnes and her husband bought seats in first class so that they would have more room to deal with their baby over the long flight, which is a more than reasonable plan. If you have the money to do it, why wouldn’t you go for the wider seats and extra leg room with a baby? Unfortunately for the Charnes, Ruby was crying when they got on board. Even more unfortunately, the other passengers in first class were a bunch of pricks who thought that they shouldn’t have to listen to it. According to Arielle’s Instagram post on the incident, “I was getting tons of eye rolls and head shakes from fellow passengers on @delta because my baby was crying (as if I could just look at Ruby and say okay now it’s time to stop 😂).”

Ah, yes. The old eye rolls and head shakes. We’ve all gotten them. After all, babies don’t belong in the air — if God wanted babies to fly, he would have given them wings, right? And those folk’s babies never cried, all they had to do was look at them and say, “Juniper Tulip, stop crying this instant. You’re making a fool of yourself.” And little Juniper would hush right up. Because their babies had manners, people.

But the poor Charnes got more than the usual lack of empathy from their fellow passengers. Wrote Charnes: “I tried to ignore the people until 10 minutes passed and a flight attendant came over to me and asked me and my baby to move to the back of the plane (as if the people in the back didn’t matter). Give up our seats that we paid for and move. Apparently I was upsetting and getting a lot of complaints from the first class passengers.”

That, my friends, is some nonsense. Charnes and her husband paid for those seats just like the rest of the people in first-class did. The perks of first-class are more comfortable seats, a drink when you get on the plane, and slightly better airline food — nowhere do they say that you will get a quiet, peaceful trip. You might as well yell at the pilot because there was turbulence.

Spending a lot of money on an airline ticket does not give people the right to dictate the behavior of the other passengers on the plane. If they want that kind of flying experience, they’d better make enough money to fly charter or they need to get the hell over themselves. And to ask these poor people to be moved out of the seats they paid for and back into coach is, as Charnes pointed out, acting “as if the people in the back didn’t matter.” And that’s just shitty. Let’s have a little self-awareness, here, shall we? You’re on the same dirty old commercial flight as the rest of us, you’re just sitting in the front.

One would hope that with privilege would come compassion, but that certainly seems not to have been the case on this flight.