United Airlines said the crew apologized to their mother, who felt “humiliated” when they tried to get their son to take away his ventilator earlier this month, NBC News reported.
Melissa Sotomayor said in the current video that the flight crew on the March 8 trip from Tampa, Florida to Newark, New Jersey tried to keep his son separate from life-saving medical devices.
“This message is for United Airlines. The way he treated his son while trying to get home from Tampa to Newark was very ridiculous,” Sotomayor said in a nearly 10-minute Tiktok video with over a million views.
United said they contacted Sotomayor, saying they “apologised for the frustration she may have experienced in order to address her concerns.” The airline did not provide further details.
Sotomayor told NBC in a text message on Sunday that the airline’s apology was “not sincere.”
Sotomayor said his son, who is “medically complicated,” relies on ventilators and tracheotomy tubes. The 2-year-old was born prematurely at 22 weeks of pregnancy, she said.
Sotomayor said he had obtained documents before their flight so that his son could fly to his destination. They did not run into problems on their first foot – a trip to Tampa.
She also shared documents with the airline prior to her trip, saying the airline had cleaned up her son’s medical equipment without any problems.
However, they ran into problems on their return flight.
Sotomayor said the flight attendant told her that medical equipment must be placed under her seat before taking off.
The mother told the crew that her son had not left the machine because “they keep him alive” and that he provided the flight attendants with her documents, including medical clearance letters from her son’s two doctors.
She then approached another flight attendant and told her that if she did not comply, they might have to move their seats, Sotomayor said.
She once again provided the document and told the attendant that she had told the airline that her seat had been selected by the airline’s accessibility department prior to her trip.
When Sotomayor contacted NBC News to her to apologise, the representative told the flight attendant reported it was a “bulkhead seat issue,” but she said they have never mentioned it now.
Witnesses were recorded the moment a British Airways flight was struck by lightning, parked at Guarljos International Airport in Sao Paulo.
“They said it was because I refused to remove my son from the portable oxygen concentrator until I left his ventilator,” Sotomayor said.
In her video, Sotomayor said a third flight attendant told her to remove the equipment, and her son said, “It’s fine until we’re in the air at a high enough altitude.” The mother refused to remove the device.
A passenger sitting nearby intervened, Sotomayor said, and apologised for the way she was being treated.
The flight captain was involved, she said.
“He says I’m having difficulty and my son’s medical equipment is dangerous to other passengers and son and I don’t follow the FAA guidelines,” Sotomayor said.
She told the captain that all medical devices were FAA approved and showed her documents.
The captain told Sotomayor that it was “dangerous” for his son to fly, and she once again told him he was medically exempt, her mother said.
The flight departed more than an hour later, she said.
“The way we were spoken to was really upset by the way we were humiliated in front of others,” Sotomayor said in the video. “The captain spoke to me as if I was intentionally putting my son in danger. They didn’t want to listen to the fact that my son relied on this equipment to keep him alive.”
Sotomayor said she contacted United.
“I feel like these airlines, well, United Airlines are being so disrespected,” she said in the video.
Jackie Zhou contributed.
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