Ding! Want to Control Your Kids?

Kudos to you, Southwest Airlines! On behalf of the millions of people who take to the skies every day I salute you for taking a stand against rogue brats running the aisles on a flight, terrorizing other passengers.

Over the Independence Day weekend a mother, her sister and their litter of four little demons were refused to board their connecting flight from Phoenix to Seattle because passengers and crew complained of the kids' behavior on the plane. The "flight from hell," as one passenger described it, included the miscreants running up and down the aisles, moving around the plane when the seat belt light was on and yelling and screaming.

The mother complained that this was foul play by Southwest.

Foul play? You are outed to the 100+ passengers and crew--and most likely hundreds of people in gate areas and other flights on your trip--as a less than qualified parent and rather than taking stock of what happened, you run to the media with your story so millions, including Judge Smails and the other innocent bystanders of poor parenting on flights every day can also know you by name? Setting a perfect example for those little terrors of yours and proof that you are not fit to be a parent.

Further to making passengers' lives hell for the duration of a flight, the actions of kids--and lack of action by parents--like these are nothing short of a high risk to the airlines. Let's suppose a little Johnny goes running up and down and aisle spills a cup of coffee on a passenger in an aisle seat or runs into the drink cart and gets hot coffee or tea spilled on themselves? You know who would suffer the wrath and have to pony up the money in the court settlement? Southwest.

Southwest has always been an airline to take risks, which have sometimes been controversial but have always paid off. They instituted the policy for people with ample carriages having to pay for two seats. They were the first airline to advertise after 9/11. They also air their daily trials and tribulations on a reality TV show.

All of these things, to Smails and the rest of us who travel regularly for business, pale in comparison to the stand Southwest took over the weekend. I can only hope that other airlines develop Time Out policies for parents with misbehaving children, with penalties ranging from being refused to board a plane to fines and even airport jail time. Maybe then these parents will start to see the errors of their ways and put some controls on their kids.

And if that doesn't work, there's always the gas chamber. Smails has sent kids younger than these to the gas chamber. I didn't have to. I felt I owed it to them.