A woman with health concerns asked to leave a flight before it took off on Sunday, after seeing that most people onboard were not wearing masks.
The anonymous passenger spoke to Stuff.co.nz, describing how she boarded her Jetstar flight from Wellington to Queenstown to find “a sea of unmasked people”.
She estimated that 70 per cent of passengers on the flight, which departed Sunday morning, were not wearing their masks.
Photos and video taken by the passenger and shown to Stuff confirm that most passengers were not complying with mask rules, the website reports.
The woman - who spoke up because she has a lung disease that makes her vulnerable to Covid-19 - asked fellow Jetstar flyers if they would mind putting their masks on.
She says they laughed and said no. At this point, she asked cabin crew if she could exit the plane before it took off.
“I said I would have to get off the plane as I felt extremely unsafe.”
Cabin crew and the pilot spoke to the vulnerable passenger, persuading her to stay on the flight and offering to seat her in an empty section of the cabin, towards the back.
She told reporters that the maskless passengers were “staring and sneering” as they moved seats, with one asking her husband, “Have you got a problem”?
“I am not a nervous person, I am fairly confident, I am good in a crisis – but at the end of that walk I was shaking,” said the woman.
She said staff were extremely helpful in the circumstances, allowing them off the plane first after it landed so they could avoid confrontation with others from the flight.
However, she told reporters she had lost confidence in Jetstar’s mask policy and staff enforcement of Covid rules.
“I said I am never flying with that airline again – they are incompetent, their duty of care just was not there.”
Masks are required on all New Zealand flights, but there are some exemptions. Yet, there are no documents or cards to prove you’re exempt and airlines are not permitted to ask for proof.
Alongside this, Jetstar is still serving drinks and snacks on their flights, with passengers able to remove masks while consuming them. This means it is hard to enforce mask rules.
Jetstar does require passengers to have either proof of vaccination or a recent negative Covid test result to fly, but is tracking this via “spot checks” rather than checking every passenger’s documentation.
A Jetstar spokesperson said it had been unable to verify the details of that particular flight but acknowledged that crew had raised concerns about the number of passengers not wearing masks.
They added: “These concerns have been fed back to the New Zealand government as part of their review into the mask exemption process across all industries.”
