When it took Virgin America Flight 404 16 hours to get its passengers from Los Angeles to New York's JFK Airport, it was hardly the first time passengers had been trapped aboard a diverted airliner for hour after hour. However, it may have been the first such incident documented on YouTube.
Seated in seat 1A, David Martin wasn't just another passenger. He is also CEO of the social networking site Kontain.com. He immediately realized the role of the Internet to inform the world about what was going on.
He began posting status reports to his Kontain account. Using the video camera in his cell phone, he began to document what was going on around him. By the end of the ordeal, his mini documentary was rocketing around the world on YouTube.
The ordeal began Saturday when Flight 404 was unable to land at JFK because of high winds and was diverted to Stewart International Airport, 90 miles away. There, the plane sat on the Tarmac, waiting for clearance to take off again.
Meanwhile, the hours passed, with the passengers, who had just completed a long trans-continental flight, remaining cooped up in the cabin with almost no food or water. After a while, Martin said, the flight crew appeared to be losing its grip.
Martin singles out one incident in particular, when he and a fellow passenger from first class were distributing a small number of cookies to mothers with small children, seated in coach. When a woman, who had been suffering panic attacks, asked if she too could have a cookie, Martin said a nearby flight attendant "snapped" at the woman, nearly sending her over the edge.
"Everyone knew she was a very frantic woman, which is why no one said anything when she asked for the cookie. Everyone understood but the flight attendant," said Martin, in the posting.
'Tensions rising big time'
"Tensions rising big time as we are grounded and passengers are trying to get off," he said in an early post. "Virgin crew losing control of passengers. Police now onboard here," he said in a later posting.
After landing at Stewart, the airline gave passengers the option of leaving the plane and it said 20 passengers did so. After four hours on the tarmac, Virgin America officially cancelled the flight and the remaining passengers made their way to New York by bus or other air connections.
Had the incident occurred after April 28, Virgin America could have been fined up to $27,000 per passenger for a tarmac delay exceeding three hours, under a new law that takes effect April 29. As it turned out, the airline simply suffered a public relations embarrassment. A high-profile one, at that.
Martin told CNN that the CEO of Virgin America, David Kush, called him personally to apologize after seeing his YouTube video. Martin said he told the airline official he should offer passengers a complete refund of their ticket, not just the $100 credit that was originally proffered.
Kush agreed, and passengers will get their money back as well as $100
off on their next Virgin America flight.
