This Is Getting Old: Another Flight Diverted Over Reclining Seat Spat

See all these people who aren’t beating each other up or demanding an emergency landing? Let’s all be like these people. (photo: Martin Rottler)

First it was that United flight where a passenger used an illegal device to prevent the person in front of them from reclining. Then an air marshal on an American Airlines flight arrested a traveler who wouldn’t give up on his complaint about the woman in front of him putting her seat back. Delta now continues this trend, diverting a flight that was almost at its destination because one passenger thought her tray table was for napping.

WPTV reports that Delta Flight 2370 from LaGuardia in NYC to Palm Beach International in Florida had to be diverted to Jacksonville on Monday night “due to safety reasons in regard to a passenger issue.”

A witness tells the station that a woman on the plane tried to recline her seat, but this didn’t go over well with the woman behind her, who was apparently trying to rest her head on the tray table at the time.

He says the napping passenger “started screaming and swearing and the flight attendant came over and that just exacerbated what was going on, and then she demanded that the flight land.”

According to the witness, the irate passenger began cussing at the flight attendants while demanding to return to terra firma, saying something like “I don’t care about the consequences, put this plane down now.”

The flight, which normally takes fewer than 2.5 hours to complete, then landed after just over two hours in Jacksonville, where the irate passenger was taken off the plane.

According to FlightAware.com, the plane got back up in the air about an hour later, making the 45-minute trip to Palm Beach.