Airline employees booted a woman off a recent United Airlines flight traveling from Las Vegas to Newark after she went on a tirade about being placed in the middle seat between “two big pigs.”
“Oh my goodness! I don’t know how I’m going to do this for the next four hours!” the woman yelled into her phone, according to a Facebook video of the incident which went viral last week and gained more than 2.7 million views as of Tuesday.
“This is just impossible ’cause they’re squishing me. Like, just unbelievable. At least they’ll keep me warm,” she continued. “I can’t sit here because they’re both so big on left and right. I can’t even sit here.”
Norma Rodgers, one of the passengers sitting next to her, decided to record the woman’s tirade on video after getting fed up with her seatmate’s fat-shaming rant.
Rodgers, a prominent nurse who used to be head of the New Jersey State Nurses Association, finally had enough of the woman’s complaining, telling her, “Bitch, please! Okay?”
“I can’t do this! I eat salad!” the woman retorted, before Rodgers flagged down a flight attendant for assistance.
“Excuse me, can you find her another seat? Because I will not be verbally abused by this bitch or anybody else,” Rodgers told the flight attendant.
The attendant then requested the woman stand in the back of the plane to allow the cabin crew to check for other available seats.
Other passengers then confronted the woman over comments as she made her way to the back of the plane.
“You should be ashamed of yourself, madam. What you’re doing is so terrible, you should be ashamed of yourself,” one passenger said.
“I’m not politically correct,” the woman snapped back. “Why don’t you try and sit between those two big pigs?”
A United Airlines spokesperson confirmed in a statement to the New York Post that the woman was eventually escorted off the plane and given “alternate travel arrangements” the following morning.
“When it became clear that this passenger’s behavior was likely to be problematic on this flight, she was provided alternate travel arrangements first thing the next morning,” the spokesperson said.