A midair commotion raged on a regularly scheduled Air Asia flight between Kuala Lumpur to Hong Kong March 27 after a passenger decided to give herself an upgrade, free of charge.
Even before the plane took off, the unnamed woman already had her eye on the row of empty seats, meandering her way over and staking claim before cabin crew told her to return to her seat. At this point, one could be forgiven for being unaware that the red-trimmed seats carried extra charges.
However, once the flight was in midair, she decided to return to the forbidden row of empty premium economy seats, and fashion them as her own chaise-longe.
Oh, right – so she knows, but just doesn’t care.
Passengers sat in other premium economy seats behind and in front of her were not impressed with her plucky nature, and the fact that they paid for the luxury of minimally more leg room, and first dibs on the emergency exit.
To be honest, at this point we can’t tell if this woman’s waste-not-want-not attitude over perfectly good seats going to waste makes her our hero, or whether her disregard for pretty simple rules make her our cheapskate foe.
Flyer Bruce Lam described the scene, as cabin crew attempted to persuade the woman to go back to her seat, and spent “four or five minutes” trying to reason with her once the flight had taken off.
At one point, her fellow travelers described that the woman as refusing to listen to anyone, while laying down and with her phone.
Finally, one man had had enough, and told her to her face that she had an “ugly attitude.” It seems that the public shaming and harsh words worked, because the woman went back to what we might presume was the worst seat on the whole plane, given this whole fiasco.
