Air Canada Flight Canceled After Crew-Passenger Dispute Over Blankets

Tensions rose when the cabin manager and passengers had an altercation. In videos posted by Jalal Belayane and other passengers on social media, we see the flight attendant raising her voice in front of passengers seated in their seats. "Are you going to behave [properly], or are we getting off?" she asks. The origin of this dispute was requests for blankets on the AC 73 flight from Air Canada scheduled for Friday at 8:50 a.m. (local time). "I saw the cabin manager come running, and that’s when I started filming, because they were shouting. The way she came running and shouting was shocking," explains Jalal Belayane, saying that there was "never any aggression against Air Canada staff, there were just requests for blankets." The passenger added that the people who requested the blankets were people in their forties and "no one got up." Four passengers would have made these requests to warm up, but the crew would not have had enough blankets for all those who wanted them among the 296 passengers, reports La Presse. Enough to provoke the indignation of some passengers on this flight whose ticket costs nearly 1,500 $.

On the orders of the cabin manager, the plane still on the ground returns to the gate to disembark the four passengers. But six passengers will be disembarked. "There, we all protested and told the local authorities that it wasn’t true and that it wasn’t what had happened, explains Jalal Belayane again. [After that], we thought it was over, we told the cabin manager to apologize, but then they took four hours to discuss up front [and we were] without water, without anything." After these long hours of waiting, the flight was canceled. "Everyone was then dispatched to hotels across Casablanca, recounts Jalal Belayane. We didn’t have our luggage with us and had to wash our shirts in sinks." The next day, the passengers did indeed board for Montreal. If the flight went well, the mishap put the health of some passengers to the test. "We were in a catastrophic situation, there were a lot of children and elderly people. The behavior of the flight attendant was unacceptable and unprofessional," fumes Younes Mekkaouis, claiming that the Air Canada employee would also have tried to prevent passengers from filming her.

In an email, Air Canada confirmed that the flight had to be canceled following an "exceptional incident that does not reflect our