Face masks cause ugly plane cabin tantrums in 2020

Passengers cheered as the woman finally left the plane. Photo / TikTok / Jordan Slade

Plane passengers have found plenty of things to bicker about over the years.

There have been vicious fights over arm rests, bags hogging overhead compartments, loud conversations, open window shades, personal grooming, feet on seats and, and of course the very heated matter of reclining.

But against the backdrop of a terrifying new virus pandemic, 2020 created a split between passengers over a much more high-stakes issue – the wearing of face masks to limit the spread of COVID-19.

And it sparked some truly spectacular meltdowns in the plane cabin.

While air travel in New Zealand and Australia virtually ground to a halt with border shutdowns and lockdown restrictions, in the US, domestic air travel mostly continued through the pandemic.

Many US airlines made it mandatory for passengers to wear face masks on flights, a policy that was welcomed by most of the travelling public.

Passengers cheered as the woman finally left the plane. Photo / TikTok / Jordan Slade

But for a few individuals who felt the safety provision was a gross violation of their human rights – despite choosing to fly with airlines that enforced it as policy – it was entirely too much to bear, and boy, did they let us know about it.

The anti-mask tantrum trend appeared to kick off in July when a woman who was dubbed an anti-mask "Karen" was booted from an American Airlines flight to the cheers of delighted passengers.

By then American Airlines had made it mandatory for all travellers over the age of two to wear a mask.

The female passenger on the Ohio to North Carolina flight claimed she didn't have to wear a face mask because of a medical condition.

Witness Jordan Slade, who filmed the woman's meltdown, said she had been disruptive even before she started arguing with cabin crew about wearing a mask.

"She demanded to be boarded first and was causing an obvious scene. Once boarded she was making phone calls and arguing with the attendant when asked to put her phone away," Slade said.

"She also refused to wear a mask putting others on the flight at risk … Another passenger even got up to confront her about her behaviour with no mask."

In Slade's video, the woman can be seen taking her time to gather her three carry-on bags as masked American Airlines flight attendants waited for her at the plane's exit.

"Just leave. We have flights to get on," one passenger called out.

Passengers broke into applause as the woman finally left the plane, prompting her to angrily snap back: "You can clap all you want."

n another dramatic outburst, in October, a woman on a plane at Belfast International Airport in Northern Ireland screamed "everyone dies" at passengers after she was told to get off the plane for refusing to wear a mask.

Shocking footage taken inside the easyJet A320 plane showed the woman appearing to cough on other travellers as she was escorted off the plane.

"Everybody dies, you know that. Every f***ing body dies," she yelled as she was thrown off.

"If it's from corona or not, everybody dies."

Police were called to the airport and arrested the woman.

That same month, two men in the US got into a fight on an Allegient Air plane that was about to take off from Phoenix, bound for Provo, Utah.

Passenger Rylie Lansford, who captured the punch-up on camera, said it all started because one of them refused a mask.

"It was absolutely insane to me because it's all about a mask," she told Utah broadcaster KSL. "It didn't need to get that way."

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Rylie Lansford (@bakedbyrylie)

It was often the case that fellow passengers, and not just airline staff, challenged anti-maskers. In another incident on a LA-bound American Airlines flight about to leave Chicago in September, several passengers begin yelling at a maskless woman on board who was delaying departure, Fox 10 reported.

"Get off the plane," passengers yelled, while another said: "There are other people on this plane. Not just you."

The woman was eventually removed and the plane took off for LA.

There were sometimes hefty consequences for passengers who refused masks. In December a woman was banned from flying with Frontier Airlines again after she refused to wear one, calling a staff member an "a**hole" in the process.

She then refused to get off the plane when told to.

"You agreed to this when you checked into our flight and you bought your ticket so I need you to come off the aircraft at this time," a Frontier Airlines attendant informed the woman because a security guard came on board to escort her off.

"Bye, Karen," passengers called out after her.

It wasn't always adults who were removed from flights for refusing masks – children were on the receiving end, too.

In December, a two-year-old girl kept taking off her mask on a United Airlines flight, prompting airline staff to kick her and her family from the plane.

Little Edeline had refused to keep a mask on, resulting in the family being escorted off the plane. Photo / Instagram

"We just got kicked off a flight because our two-year-old would not put on a mask," said the child's mother Eliz Orban, who was flying from Colorado to Newark, New Jersey.

In a video of the incident, two-year-old Edeline is seen visibly upset and refusing to put the mask on before an airline crew member walks over and asks for the family to step off the aircraft.

"We felt like we got no warning, no working with us, no asking questions, nothing to help in the situation," Orban said.

"It was just like, 'Oh, well your two-year-old is not complying, you guys are off the plane.'"

In a statement, United Airlines said the mask rule applied to all passengers over the age of two.