A woman has revealed what happened when passengers on her flight were asked to stay seated so those in danger of missing their connections could deplane first.
Janelle Rupkalvis is a travel influencer who flies with Delta and regularly shares tips and clips of her adventures to social media across multiple platforms under the handle janelleonajet. One video in particular has been garnering attention of late. It focuses on an incident that unfolded last year as she attempted to make a connecting flight as part of a trip from LAX to Barcelona in Spain.
Rupkalvis’ initial flight was hit with major delays, leaving her with little to no time to make her connection at JFK Airport in New York.
“The time between my connections went from two hours to like four or five minutes,” she told Newsweek.
Passengers who did not have a connecting flight to get to were asked to stay seated. They had other ideas.
janelleonajet/TikTok
While several people on the plane had already missed their connections, Rupkalvis was one of a handful that still had a small window of time but she would need to be quick.
“We had a chance to make it,” she said. “There were maybe four or five flights that had extremely tight connections. You need to sprint to make it.”
That’s what made what unfolded when they landed all the more frustrating. Air travel can be stressful. Expedia’s 2024 Travel Hacks report found that 55 percent of Americans consider it to be a “leading cause of stress.”
Maybe that’s why everyone on Rupkalvis’ flight reacted in the way they did. She said that flight attendants had made multiple announcements to passengers requesting that anyone who didn’t have a connecting flight stay seated. They fell on deaf ears.
“Everyone got up,” Rupkalvis said. “No one remained seated.”
She had been sitting in the first row and, with passengers disembarking from the rear of the aircraft, recalled facing a battle to get through the “mounds of people” in front of her.
“I was very vocal, saying ‘I’m on one of these tight connections let me through,'” she said.
While some people made way for and attempted to help her get through, some were apparently oblivious to her plight. Rupkalvis captured the ensuing chaos in a video posted to her TikTok showing her having to repeatedly push through passengers exiting the plane at a leisurely pace.
“Some passengers were taking up the entire jet bridge just walking very casually,” she remembered.
Rupkalvis can still recall what followed.
“These connections were so tight, if you weren’t sprinting to your gate you had zero chance of making it,” she said. “There was a group of 10 and 15 of us sprinting through, weaving back and forth through these people that were also trying to sprint past this group.”
Their efforts proved in vain.
“We had missed the flight by a minute or two and there wasn’t another one until the next day,” she said.
Rupkalvis believes there was no reason for so many people to stand up as “not every person had a tight connection” but concluded that, unfortunately, “people tend to look out for themselves at airports.”
Newsweek reached out to Delta for comment on their procedure for situations of this kind but had not received a response at the time of writing. Rupkalvis has some suggestions for how things could be improved though, suggesting flight attendants “ask people to raise their hands” if they are trying to make a connection.
“It’s helpful if airlines have passengers raise their hands on their connections so everyone looks around and sees,” Rupkalvis said. “It’s better when the flight attendants have some kind of check. If you leave it to passengers to do it, in my experience they don’t listen and just get off like normal.”
She just hopes the video chronicling her experience encourages people to do the right thing.
“Making a connection can be the difference between someone making an important event,” she said. “Be kind to other passengers and follow crew instructions.”
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