The Canadian musician who was kicked off a plane because her son wouldn't stop crying would like an apology from the airline.
Walk Off the Earth singer Sarah Blackwood, who is seven months pregnant, was on a United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Vancouver on Wednesday. She was travelling with her son, who is 23 months old.
"My son was just really fussy. He was really tired," Blackwood said in an interview.
The boy was sitting on her lap and "crying really loud," Blackwood said, when she was approached by flight attendants who told her she needed to "control my child."
The boy was still crying as the plane was taxiing to the runway. The plane then stopped, and the pilot announced he had to return to the gate to refuel. But when the plane got back to the gate, Blackwood and her son were asked to leave the plane. Soon after, she took to Twitter to share her experience.
A spokesperson for Skywest Airlines, which was operating the flight, said Blackwood and her son were removed for safety reasons.
"The crew made a very difficult decision to remove the passengers from the flight after repeated attempts to ensure that the child was safely seated before takeoff," the spokesperson said. "The child was repeatedly in the aisle during taxi out and after numerous attempts to try and ensure he was secured."
Blackwood said that is "ridiculous."
"I know that he needs to be on my lap during taxi and takeoff and landing. And...we were in a window seat with a gentleman beside me that I didn't know, so my son would have had to climb over him to get into the aisle, which he wouldn't do," she said.
That account was backed up by Paul William Moore, who said he was on the flight.
"The only person that was not empathetic to the clearly stressful situation was the flight attendant, who warned the mother three times to keep her kid quiet," he wrote on United Airline's Facebook page. "Sure enough the flight attendant followed through on her warning and had the plane return from taxiing to position on the runway back to the airport."
The child, he said, was asleep by the time the plane was taxiing back to the gate.
Blackwood still hadn't heard from the airline by Thursday afternoon.
"I would love an apology," she said.
She took to social media first and foremost to share her story, not to seek an apology. "I just feel like it was more important for me to get the word out there than anything else. I just don't want other people to get treated like this," she said.