Fight or flight?
Footage captured the dramatic moment that two male passengers clashed during a wild inflight rumble over a reclined seat.
The mid-air kerfuffle kicked off Saturday during a Jetstar Airways flight from Bali, Indonesia to Melbourne, Australia, Jam Press reported.
In the wild video, a middle-aged man with a crew cut can be seen engaged in a heated, expletive-laden exchange with people in the row behind him.
“Do you think one of us is going to f–king die?” shouts the passenger, before labeling the people behind him “drunk f–king pieces of s–t.”
The situation escalates after a man in a baseball cap gets up and attempts to grab him by reaching over the seats as other flyers cry out in shock.
Thankfully, a quick-thinking man in blue grabs the enraged assailant by the arm and drags him back to his seat, potentially preventing inflight fisticuffs.
At that moment, flight attendants scrambled to the scene to de-escalate the situation with one declaring, “Boys, that’s enough.”
A Jetstar Airways representative has addressed the altercation in a statement.
“We have a zero-tolerance policy for disruptive and abusive behavior on our flights,” they declared. “Our crew members are trained to de-escalate incidents involving unruly passengers and we thank them for how they managed this situation.”
They have since launched an investigation into the incident.
This isn’t the first time a reclined seat has sparked a mid-air row.
In September, Cathay Pacific banned a couple from flying with them after a tiff over the angle of one’s air chair devolved into a shouting match involving xenophobic insults.
In general, etiquette experts advise flyers to avoid leaning their seat back unless they can guarantee that it won’t inconvenience the person behind them.
“Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it,” Tami Claytor of “Always Appropriate: Image and Etiquette Consulting” told HuffPost. “Reclining your seat and interfering with someone else’s comfort violates the basic principle of etiquette.”
However, this golden rule differs depending on the duration of the trip.
While it’s generally agreed that reclining way back is poor form during a puddle jump, on a long fight “it’s unreasonable to expect each passenger not to do what they can to get comfortable,” according to decency guru Diane Gottsman.
“If it’s a red eye, sleep is important and reclining is acceptable, especially since everyone else is reclining at the same time,” she said.
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