Disturbed frontman David Draiman writes ‘open letter’ to Jet Blue about his wife Lena Yada’s not so pleasant breast feeding experience on their airline
Dear #JetBlue,
I flew your airline yesterday. Flight #1295, that was delayed an hour or so (not the end of the world) leaving from JFK and arriving at AUS. My wife and I are new parents of a 4 month old baby boy. Needless to say, traveling with a baby can be challenging. That is why airlines typically make special accommodations for parents traveling with children or infants, and enable them to be some of the first to board, along with uniformed servicemen, anyone disabled, the first class cabin (or in your case, the “Even more room” section, where I in fact was seated with my wife anyway).
Being the considerate people we are, we went to great lengths to make sure that our baby wouldn’t be a trouble or nuisance to anyone, and planned his feedings so that he would be nursing at ascent and descent to prevent him from having issues with pressurization, and letting everyone know about it (he’s got lungs like his Daddy…lol). Once we had finally boarded the plane, since the delay had occurred, we were an hour or so later in feeding him than he would have liked, so he began to fuss. My wife of course immediately began to prepare herself as I held the baby.
At that time your lousy excuse for a human being that you have working as a flight attendant, that was on that flight that night in our section, named Manuel, came up to us and had all our coats. He asked if they were ours. My wife said yes and then Manuel decided to just throw all the coats on top of my wife, as she’s preparing to breast feed, as the baby is starting to cry. My wife objected (we had all our carry on items under our seats for accessibility/things we needed for the baby, all we had up top were the coats), asking if they could simply be put somewhere else for the time being so she could feed the baby (I’m holding him while he’s starting to scream now mind you). He responded rudely by saying “lady, I’ve got luggage to get on this plane”, and ran off leaving the pile of coats in my wife’s lap and me holding my screaming child.
Seriously?
She asked him to come back as the the volume level began to rise and started arguing with my wife. I then said, in a very soft and rather calm voice, “Come on buddy, cut the crap for a minute would you, and help us out for just a second?”, to which Manuel responded “You can’t talk to me that way sir” and then proceeded to tell the captain to call security to the plane. The entire group of passengers around me were astounded, including one off duty police officer, who was gallant enough to step up and take our defense with your flight attendant, call off the air marshall from having us ejected from the plane, because I dared to use the words “cut the crap” to your worthless employee (Thanks again brother, wherever you are, I won’t forget it). We finally got the jackets squared away and my wife was able to feed the baby through the ascent and all was well the whole rest of the flight with him (the baby).
I demand that you have corrective/disciplinary action taken against this “Manuel”, and documented for mine and my attorney’s review. If you don’t, I will go to great lengths to make sure everyone in my organization and all my colleagues know of what your employee did and that, and that no corrective action was taken (there will be a ripple effect from the noise my friends and I can make, believe it).
I’ve enjoyed using your airline for years, and have even been a stockholder. Make this right.
Thank you for your kind attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
David Draiman
—————–
David Draiman’s wife Lena Yada before the baby
David Draiman @ Twitter
Lena Yada @ Twitter
Metal Sludge
Disludged