Woman arrested after discovering vomit on plane seat

An American woman says she was removed from a Frontier Airlines flight in handcuffs after complaining about vomit on a plane seat.

Rosetta Swinney from North Carolina was horrified to discover her fourteen-year-old daughter had been assigned a seat covered in vomit.

"It was on the bag, all over her shirt, her hands," Swinney told ABC11, after her unsuspecting daughter had made the unpleasant discovery.

Alerting a flight attendant, she was not expecting such a lack of help, let alone to be ejected from her flight.

On confronting the crew member about cleaning up the mess: "...she turned around to me and said, 'that's not my job.'"

And instead of helping Swinney the attendant reported her as a disruptive passenger who needed to be removed from the flight.

According to the Las Vegas Review Journal the incident happened last week, on Frontier Airline's flight 2066 from Las Vegas McCarran to Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.

Frontier Airlines stands by the flight attendant's version of events.

"The flight attendants apologised and immediately invited the mother and her teenage daughter to move to either end of the plane so that the seat area could be cleaned," Frontier said in a statement.

However, witnesses have come forward in support of Swinney, including a passenger who wrote her in a Facebook post under the name of Lynette Lipke.

Lipke wrote that "the stewardess gave the young girl Clorox wipes and gloves," when they asked for a new seat, however an offer was not forthcoming.

In a statement by the airline, Swinney and her daughter were told it was not certain if new seats could be found until boarding was completed.

McCarran International Airport police boarded the plane where they told passengers that everyone would have to disembark in order to remove Swinney. Once off the plane, she was arrested and charged with 'misdemeanour trespassing'.

The departure had already been delayed by 20 minutes, reportedly for cleaning.

The incident was recorded by fellow passenger Nikki Nickole, who posted the footage to Facebook, saying :

"Keep in mind there is an entire row (3) of empty seats in front of us. The attendant could have simply switched their seats and asked someone to come clean up the vomit."

When no compromise could be found, the whole plane was disembarked in order to remove Swinney and her daughter.

In their statement Frontier airlines explained:

"The mother was unsatisfied with the response and became disruptive. As a result, the flight attendants determined that the mother and daughter should be deplaned and accommodated on another flight. The mother refused, and following procedure, law enforcement was called. Law enforcement then requested that everyone deplane so that the mother and daughter could be removed allowing the aircraft to be re-boarded and depart."

Swinney, 53, works as a pharmacy technician and has hired a civil rights attorney to defend the trespassing charge, reports The Independent.