Delta/KLM as well as Aer Lingus priority board those with disability, families with babies/toddlers and some kind of business class together.

You came to tell me how wrong I was, and it turns out you were incorrect, yet I'm the asshole?

I think you are right, and gosh - it's sad. We are all such individuals now that we cannot take our heads out of the butts of our own sense of entitlement to have any thought for why others might occasionally require exceptions.

I was also just thinking about the unpleasant irony inherent in using the word "spaz" in a discussion with special needs at its root.

I think also people are afraid of being cheated. Better to stop one scammer than help 100 people who need it. Same rationale for welfare requirements.

Yeah - it's nonsense. I flew with my toddler (and yeah, he had his seat) - but when he was having problems and needed to be on my lap, the flight attendant fitted us with the special seat belt they use for lap babies. It was no big deal. It was also not an American airline.

Actually, it's more about how Americans deal with disabilities - and children. You'd NEVER get this sort of problem on a flight in the EU.

Because the law hasn't caught up with planes, yet.

Holy shit, for real. It seems like they didn't want to fly economy with the rest of the peasants, but didn't want to shell out $$$ for the extra seat in business class. So now we're stuck with this piss poor excuse for drama.

I literally just can't accept how ill informed you are. Please ceck to make sure you know what you're talking about before spouting off.

Since the child in question is only 3 and has needed her own seat for less than a year thus far, I would be curious as to what their definition of "we've done it lots of times" is. How many times a year does a family of 6 travel on a plane?

Whether or not lap children should be permitted at all is not without controversy. One of the flight attendants who survived the United 232 crash has campaigned against it, as I believe there were a higher proportion of fatalities among lap children. I imagine the idea here is that the smaller the child the easier it…

Because airliners want that profit. They know some people can't afford the seat for the tiny baby when going on a family vacation.

And yet babies don't need their own seat. So maybe it's not a safety issue.

Turbulence. The child getting hurt. Oh, no! But it's ok to have a child less than two years old on your lap. So the airline cares a lot about older kids but doesn't care about infants? Or maybe this rule is not about turbulence.

Airplanes are a special level of lack-of-accommodation hell for people with disabilities. I've seen flight attendants refuse to transfer someone off a flight in a Washington chair and say they should just crawl, airlines lose someone's wheelchair (which should be impossible given that it's the last thing loaded on the…

Buying a plane ticket is a little more complex than going into a retail store. If it's an issue, make sure everyone knows what's up before they can actually purchase the ticket. That way there are no surprises. It's a lot harder to deal with being kicked off a plane than being kicked out of a store.

Well, it seems like they've done it before, lots of times (". . . and always flies sitting on one of her parents' laps"), and no one said anything before, so how would they know it would be a problem this time? Instead of springing this on them all of a sudden, why not tell them "OK, next time, you need a safety seat,…

Yes, I think this is a big problem all over the world. And it isn't just about accommodation, in general people have way too little contact with the disabled, in my opinion. So people are extremely insecure about how to deal with them and simply do not know what they can and cannot do. It is extremely frustrating when…

This story also pretty perfectly captures how bad most people are at accommodating disabilities, all over the place. It seems most people don't know that much, if anything, about what accommodation is and how it works, and they keep falling back on "these are the rules and we can't make exceptions". You are supposed…