A woman recently traveling with two infant girls is now suing American Airlines (AAL) -) over how she was treated during a flight.
On a Feb. 4 flight from Portland, Ore. to Tallahassee, Fla. — including a layover in Dallas — Erika Hamilton, 36, had tickets for one infant to travel in her lap and the other in a seat.
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Hamilton described herself as a lawyer who lives in Portland, Ore. and works for the state.
"I read all the rules before I flew," Hamilton told TheStreet in a phone interview.
"It's that they (infants) either have to be on your lap or they have to be in another seat," she explained. "And they can only be in another seat (without being in a car seat) if they can sit up on their own. And my kids at that time could get up on their own."
She said she had checked the car seats in before the flight.
"It's not really realistic for me to carry even one car seat through the airport when I'm also carrying two kids. So, that's kind of why I don't travel with car seats," Hamilton said. "You also just never know if they're gonna fit on these really small hopper planes, which is what we were on from Dallas to Tallahassee. It's just two seats on each side, really kind of cramped in there."
The first leg of the trip had gone fine, Hamilton recalled.
"We flew from Portland to Dallas without issue," she said.
The trouble began on the airplane in Dallas
Hamilton said she and her 18-month-old daughters boarded the flight in Dallas and got settled.
"When I initially sat down on the plane, it ended up being a really, really empty flight," Hamilton said. "And so I put my two girls into our two seats, and then I sat across the aisle from them because it's always my preference to have them in a seatbelt."
"And the flight attendant came over and was hassling me about whether it was safe for me to be seated that far away from my kids," she continued. "So I just said, you know what, fair enough. I didn't buy this seat. So I just moved back."
Erika Hamilton
At that point, Hamilton said she had one daughter on her lap and the other in the seat next to them.
She then described at length to TheStreet the next interaction she said she had with the flight attendant.
The flight attendant came back and started really digging into me about my kids, asking when they were born. She seemed really confused because they had the same birthday and seemed to think that I didn't know the age of my kids because I kept saying they had the same birthday.
Twins were a difficult concept, apparently, and she just kind of really dug in about what was I doing as a single mother traveling with two kids. She said I've never seen this before and all of my years being a flight attendant, I've never seen a mother travel alone with two infants before and just really started digging into this idea that I shouldn't be there with two kids.
So this was going on, and then she said this was against FAA rules, and against the American Airlines rules, to fly with a kid in a seat without a car seat. And I said it's absolutely not. I read the rules. I could pull the rules up for you. The rule is just to be able to sit independently and the flight attendant said that's absolutely not true. So, I pulled up the American Airlines rule. I showed it to her.
Her next responses were that we have an unwritten rule that prohibits them from flying. And as a lawyer that kind of thing just drives me crazy because you can't have unwritten rules.
The next thing to happen was a kind gesture from a complete stranger.
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Hamilton said this went on for quite a long time. It became clear to her that the flight attendant was going to try to remove her from the flight.
Then, the woman seated behind Hamilton offered to hold the other infant.
"I think she (the flight attendant) spoke to the captain about it. And then she came back to me and she said, do you want her to hold the kid?" Hamilton said.
"And I said, 'No, I don't. I want her to sit in the seat that I bought for her next to me.’ But it sounded like, essentially, I didn't have an option. So I'm willing to let her hold this kid," Hamilton said. "And she held her for the duration of the flight. Absolute godsend and nicest woman on the planet. The other woman next to her too. The two women didn't know each other, but they were both just so wonderful."
Hamilton said, however, the conflict didn't end there.
"The flight attendant came back a number of times to keep heckling me about this and keep telling me, 'You're not allowed to be here. You shouldn't have done this. You didn't know the rules.'" she said.
"And every time she came back, I would tell her, 'I know the rules. I'm allowed to be here. These are the rules,'" she continued. "At one point, she asked me, 'Why do you keep arguing with me?' And I said, 'Because you keep coming up to me and intending to keep pushing this dispute. If you don't want to talk about this anymore, please stop coming back to me to talk about it.'"
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Hamilton said after another half hour, the flight attendant came back to her and apologized.
"She said, 'I'm sorry, you're right. You're totally entitled to be here. I misunderstood the rule,'" Hamilton said.
The conflict continues after the flight
Upon arriving in Florida, Hamilton said she tried to put the whole ordeal behind her.
She did, however, reach out to American Airlines to request compensation. She said she expected something like a refund for her flight and perhaps a $200 voucher.
American Airlines refused to give Hamilton a full refund. So she decided to sue them in small claims court.
That same day, Hamilton said, the American Airlines flight attendant, with whom she had the conflict, wrote up a report.
But that report only served to anger Hamilton again, she told TheStreet.
"Her report is just completely fabricated from start to finish. It said that she determined that I couldn't safely manage my kids," she said. "It basically said I was a hot mess, my kids were falling all over the floor, I couldn't control them, it was unsafe. And so she determined that she essentially had to give my kid to a stranger because I couldn't manage them."
"So that obviously got me really fired up," Hamilton added. "Before that, I kind of felt like the flight attendant made a mistake, but she owned up to it. She made my life a living hell for a couple of hours, but everybody has bad days. Everybody makes a mistake, everybody behaves in a way they regretted."
The lawsuit is filed in the Small Claims Department in the Circuit Court of the State of Oregon for Multnomah County.
Hamilton is seeking $3,500 in damages and said the case is going to court in October.
"In litigation, American Airlines has taken the position that under its contract of carriage, the airline isn’t actually required to provide passengers with any seat at all," Ben Schlappig wrote on travel site One Mile at a Time. "Therefore it’s not a breach of contract to fly a ticketed passenger without a seat, as long as you get them from the origin to destination."
"American also doubles down in claiming that the flight attendant could deny boarding to the infant at their sole discretion. American basically seems to suggest that the flight attendant not knowing the rules was a perfectly fine reason to deny boarding," as Schlappig described the lawsuit. "Again, there’s no indication that the flight attendant determined that Erika’s daughter wasn’t capable of sitting on her own, but rather she just misunderstood the policy in general."
According to the filing documents viewed by TheStreet, American Airlines filed a Motion for Summary Judgment on Aug 15.
Those documents say Hamilton is unable to produce evidence to back up the claim her Contract of Carriage (CoC) was breached and that damages and emotional stress were caused by the incident.
The burden shifts to Plaintiff to produce evidence in support of her theory of that breach, damages incurred, and the severe emotional distress she endured. Plaintiff cannot merely provide an alternative version of the "facts to meet Plaintiff’s burden.” Plaintiff cites to nothing in the record nor offers anything more than her opinion and repeated statements that "she will prove at trial" the facts necessary to support the substantive elements of her claims against American. Since Plaintiff cannot meet each of the substantive elements of her claims as shown in American's Motion for Summary Judgment and the Reply that follows and offers nothing material in her Response to the contrary, American asks that the Court grant American’s Motion for Summary Judgment on each of Plaintiff’s claims.
At the time of publication, American Airlines had not responded to two requests for comment on the incident.
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