A woman said she had been left “humiliated” by United Airlines after flight crew members tried to get her to remove her son’s ventilator ahead of takeoff.
Melissa Sotomayor posted a video on TikTok that has received over 1.2 million views where she claimed the flight crew on a trip from Tampa, Florida to Newark, New Jersey, tried to make her detach her son from his medical equipment it so the plane could take off.
United said it had contacted the mother and apologised after the incident, but did not provide any further details.
“This message is for United Airlines. The way that you treated my son when we were attempting to fly home from Tampa to Newark was absolutely ridiculous,” Sotomayor said in an almost 10-minute TikTok video.
Ms Sotomayor explained that her one-year-old son is “medically complex” and depends on a ventilator and a tracheostomy tube. Her son was born prematurely at 22 weeks.
Before she boarded the flight, Ms Sotomayor said she obtained documentation so her son could fly to their destination.
On the first leg of their trip to Tampa, she said she did not encounter any issues, and shared the documents with the airline who also cleared her sons’s medical equipment with no issues.
However, upon their 8 March return trip, she claimed a flight attendant told her she would need to make the medical equipment, including the ventilator and a portable oxygen concentrator, secure for takeoff, asking for her son to be taken off them.
Ms Sotomayor explained to the crew member that the equipment could not be turned off because “they are keeping him alive” and showed them medical documentation.
Another flight attendant came over and said that they might be moved from their seats if she did not comply but she again showed the documents and told the crew that the airline’s accessibility department selected her seats ahead of her flight.
A third flight attendant allegedly told the mother to remove her son’s equipment and said her son would “be okay until we're in the air at a high enough altitude”.
However, Ms Sotomayor refused to remove the equipment, while a nearby passenger got involved and apologised for how she was being treated.
The flight’s captain then intervened, with Ms Sotomayor saying in her video: “He then says that I am being difficult and my son’s medical equipment is a danger to other passengers and to my son, and that I am not following FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] guidelines.”
Again, Ms Sotomayor showed her documentation and told the captain that the medical equipment was FAA-approved.
The captain told her that he would contact United as he did not “feel that your son should be flying, it's dangerous for him”, but the mother said her son was medically cleared.
Eventually, the flight departed more than an hour later.
“I get no apology from them,” Ms Sotomayor added, saying the next thing she knew the captain “announces that the plane is ready for takeoff”.
After the flight, Sotomayor to NBC News that when the airline contacted her to apologise the representative said the crew reported it was a “bulkhead seating problem”, but she stated that they never mentioned that in the moment.
“They said it was because I was refusing to remove my son from his ventilator and portable oxygen concentrator until takeoff,” Sotomayor told the website.
“I was really upset by the way we were humiliated in front of others in the way we were talked to," Sotomayor said in the TikTok video.
“The captain talked to me as if I was purposely endangering my son, and they were unwilling to listen to the fact that my son was dependent on this equipment to keep him alive.”
In its statement regarding Ms Sotomayor’s claims, United told The Independent: “We’ve connected with the customer to address her concerns and apologised for any frustration she may have experienced.”
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