Dozens of ‘Unruly’ Boston Teens Stage Hours-Long ‘Mask Rebellion’ on Flight to Bahamas
Passengers describe the incident that delayed an American Airlines flight.
An American Airlines flight headed from Charlotte, North Carolina to Nassau, Bahamas was cancelled and rescheduled a day later — along with more than a few vacations — when most of the teens in a group of about 30 high school students from Boston caused a disturbance over their refusal to wear Covid masks.
On an already-delayed flight, the group of teenagers “decided to stage a mask rebellion that lasted for hours,” according to Charlotte’s WSOC-TV.
American Airlines confirmed today that flight 893, which had already been delayed once on Monday for mechanical issues, was cancelled overnight and not rescheduled until Tuesday morning.
According to witnesses, the gaggle of 17 and 18 year old students were aboard the flight as part of a graduation trip. Their actions resulted in the day long delay of their own trip as well as that of at least one front line Covid worker.
“All they had to do was follow the rules, put the mask on, sit there,” said passenger Christina Randolph speaking to WSOC. “And they couldn’t do it.”
Randolph lost a full day on her trip, which is a difficult blow, she points out, because as a nurse, “it’s really, really hard to get time off work. So when you finally get time off, you really want to be somewhere you want to be.”
“It was bad. First, they were yelling. They were cursing. They were being very obnoxious,” passenger Malik Banks told WSOC. ““It wasn’t all of them. I would say 75% to 80% of them were being terrible kids, saying smart stuff.”
In the above clips, passengers describe the incident and consequences.
For the students, those consequences were that they were stuck in the airport overnight. But they were rebooked to the Bahamas along with the rest of the passengers on Tuesday.
Presumably they wore masks on the rescheduled flight, which was slated for departure Tuesday morning and was not listed as delayed or cancelled.
