Air Canada Flight to Morocco Disrupted by Passenger Confrontation

Chantal LePage and Marc LeBlanc were marked by the 7-hour Air Canada AC 072 flight, operated on February 16. While they were mid-flight, the conversation with a passenger sitting next to them "quickly derails," Chantal confides. "He says: ’your wife, she doesn’t respect the man. She touched me with her foot several times.’ It wasn’t true. So Marc looks at him and says: ’what are you trying to say?’" Tears escape Chantal. Her husband switches seats with her, but it is difficult for him to reason with the individual. "Then he said to my husband: ’as soon as I get off the plane, I’m going to fix you up like we fix the world like you in my country,’" Chantal recounts.

The couple changes seats two rows from the individual, but he does not back down. He became unstable. Pumps in the aisle, back and forth to his seat... He was bothering the couple. "I told a flight attendant to do something, she told me: ’we could tie him up, but we don’t want to scare the rest [of the passengers], we don’t want to disrupt the flight.’" The individual was therefore not isolated from the other passengers. "We didn’t sleep. During the night, he was bumping into my husband’s shoulder. Every time he passed, he kicked his feet," Chantal also confided.

Air Canada "did everything possible to prevent this unstable situation from worsening," the company assured in a correspondence addressed to radio-canada.ca on March 8. Enough to make the Canadian react. "It says the company did everything. But me, the flight attendant had told me that the passenger could have been tied up because he was being watched from the start. So the company didn’t do everything it had to do. You’re not going to make me believe that the staff isn’t trained for this kind of situation," she fumed.