The photo Jill Tarlow provided to ABC News
I can’t say who is right; airline passenger Jill Tarlow or airline executive John McDonald. Both tell contradictory versions of the same story.
Did US Airways allow a man to board an airplane and sit conspicuously in the first class cabin wearing only ladies’ panties, a jog bra, thigh-high stockings and a see-through shrug while all manner of passengers walked past to get to their seats in economy? That’s what Ms. Tarlow says happened.
Or is John McDonald, spokesman for US Airways correct? He says the first-class, cross-dressing, Dividend miler, was asked to cover up sometime after Ms. Tarlow snapped his photo in the San Francisco Airport waiting area and before he boarded the plane.
The he said/she said is part of the larger argument over whether passengers have a right to fly as I wrote in Tuesday’s New York Times.
About a year ago I featured on my other blog, FLYING LESSONS, a supermarket near my house that has good prices and great customer service. I asked Fairway to please teach airlines what they know about inspiring employees to treat customers with respect.
Can we make the airplane atmosphere suitable for small children?
But when it comes to setting a higher standard for the general public, it’s the airlines who have something to teach the rest of us.
Yes, there is something wrong in allowing people of any gender to wear provocative clothing on a airplane, or to engage in provocative behavior or even use provocative language. And seemingly alone among most other forms of public accommodation, airlines have been given the right to establish such standards for their customers. Even, as the case of the cross-dressing flyer seems to show, arbitrary standards.
This is a good thing. Not the arbitrary part, that’s what gets a young black man with droopy drawers booted off a flight while a white man in lingerie stays planted in his first class seat (In Jill Tarlow’s version of events).
We're all in this together
No, what’s good is the acknowledgement that in environments where the door gets shut and we are locked in together at cruise altitude, the airline can insist that everyone hew to a conservatively respectful standard.
In my interview with social media psychologist Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Resource Center in California, she said people who are involved in the kinds of confrontations that result in being evicted from an airplane are generally aware of the boundaries.
“If they were perfectly honest”, she said, “everyone has a certain understanding of what the expected behavior in a certain environment is.” When actions tip over the line, even the squishy line between the inappropriate and the truly unacceptable, to be surprised is either either naïve or an act, she says.
Look, the world is full of people who for reasons quite admirable – like Gandhi or striving – like Ann Coulter, use confrontation as means to achieving a goal. What airlines have is a lever; They can say, “In the skyway, it’s my way or the highway”.
So who’s to say that this discussion, ringing across You Tube, Twitter and today’s New York Times, won’t unleash a new kind of thinking? Having been given a glimpse into an alternative in which our fellow travelers are free to lounge around the cabin in their undies, might we take it on ourselves to straighten up and fly right?
Author of The New York Times bestseller, The Crash Detectives, I am also a journalist, public speaker and broadcaster specializing in aviation and travel.
