A professional boxing star claims he was thrown off an American Airlines flight after a woman complained about the Saudi Arabia flag he was carrying and the captain agreed with her. This is egregious if the events onboard unfolded as he claims.
Boxer Removed From American Airlines Flight After Woman…And Captain…Were Afraid Of His Saudi Arabia Flag
Sean Gibbons was flying from Mexico City to El Paso, Texas via Dallas on American Airlines. He was booked on United Airlines earlier in the afternoon via Houston, but missed the flight and rebooked on AA.
He was carrying a flag of Mexico and Saudi Arabia and was in Mexico to promote an upcoming fight in Saudi Arabia (which has invested heavily in sports like boxing and golf as part of its effort to diversify its economy).
Onboard, he placed the flags in the seatback pocket. Five minutes later, a flight attendant came up to him and asked him to place the flags in the overhead bin, telling him that a female passenger was uncomfortable with the Saudi Arabia flag.
He complied.
But 10 minutes later, two security guards came onboard and approached Gibbons with the flight attendant. Gibbons was told that the captain would not fly with him, viewing him as a “security risk.”
He was asked to step off the aricraft and complied.
He tells his story below:
— Sean Gibbons (@KnuckleheadSean) April 14, 2024
Gibbons, who claims to be a 1.8 MillionMiler flyer with Premier 1K status on United Airlines, ended up flying United Airlines back to Texas and even filmed a video of one of the United pilots posing with the Saudi and Mexican flags.
Hey American Airlines – You threw me off the plane in Mexico City because some women complained about my Saudi Arabia flag ! Your ignorant pilot said I was a security threat ! Well Viva United Airlines the Best and only airline to fly 1-K Sean Gibbons pic.twitter.com/JLYN279tlM
— Sean Gibbons (@KnuckleheadSean) April 12, 2024
Looks folks, you may not support Saudi Arabia or its government, but throwing someone off a plane for carrying a Saudi flag is a disgusting overreaction. And it appears the captain never tried to understand the situation, instead just giving in to a bigoted passenger clouded by ignorance. I’m so sick of the “security risk” canard that is pulled to justify fear and paranoia.
Saudi Arabia, like so many nations, is complicated…but whatever your views may be on the Kingdom does not justify telling someone to hide his Saudi flag, let alone kick him off a plane.
CONCLUSION
We’ve asked American Airlines to clarify if anything else happened onboard to justify Gibbon’s ejection…but it sounds like it was just another case of “speech for me, but not for thee” and a whole lot of ignorance on display. I might be able to understand it coming from one passenger, but I cannot tolerate it coming from a captain.
The woman and the captain are examples of a moronic society that has emerging in this country. Uncomfortable with a flag? Tell her to walk to her destination.
@Santastico … a trio of morons actually … the moron with the flags was equally out of bounds . Flags on sticks go into checked luggage , so as to not upset the moron snowflakes .
Except my Israel and USA flags are Both on my lapel , and if the moron snowflakes don’t like it , it is their problem .
Sounds like you are the biggest snowflake of all.
Imagine the outrage among Boarding Area bloggers if this was an Israeli flag..
Israel is engaging in the worst form of genocide in history. There is a reason Zionists and globalists have been hated for thousands of years.
Why is it you and those like you never mention Hamas and how they brought this war upon Gaza? And here’s the solution: Hamas could end the war in the next 15 minutes by surrendering – fighters, hostages, arms, etc. Aid could be flowing within hours, and rebuilding could start. Maybe the billionaire Hamas leadership could actually donate some of their wealth (by graft?) to help Gaza rebuild. But I will not hold my breath waiting for such from you.
*this*
And what about the occupation before Oct 7th? The massacres, the land stealing, the unlawful hostage taking, er, arrests of Palestinians and holding them in Administrative Detention without charges, the burning down of houses, etc, all by Israel?
History didn’t start on Oct 7th.
Israel left Gaza and closed all settlements in 2005. You folks are progressive suckers for a proxy war funded by Iran.
Amen!!!
Israel is an occupying force and has been for 80 years. Israel is 100% responsible for all the violence. According to the UN charter, all actions are justified to defend against an occupying force. Israel could go back to the borders of 1967 and stop persecuting and torturing millions of Palestinians. 20% of Palestinians are White Christians who are direct descendants of Jesus’ followers.
Not 20%, about 2% of Palestinians in Palestine are Christian. There was significant decline due to the well knows tolerance of Muslim regimes.
This is how you tell the anti-semites. Right here. We have one and his name is David Arnett, and he hates Jews.
One has to wonder about the historical ignorance of somebody who can make a claim such as this, having managed to stay completely naive to the circumstances of any other war in history, compared to which this one is rather ordinary in every way except for the exceptional depravity of the rapes, murders, and kidnappings which started it and the fact that Jews are winning it.
Only Israel is allowed to get away with rapes, murdering, and kidnapping.
Absolutely insane if as described. AA owes this man an apology and a good amount of miles. This man was no more of a flight risk than a child. The lady that complained is why it’s still acceptable to use the C word to describe certain individuals.
Karen doesn’t begin with C
Why is it always AA?
That is quite a reasonable question indeed.
I doubt the lady recognized the flag as Saudi. She probably just saw Arabic writing with a sword underneath, associated it with the middle east as a whole, and got scared.
Or perhaps she is super-informed and got scared because, on 9/11, 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis
Valid security concern because of how useless the TSA is.
Or maybe she saw the Mexican flag and thought he was there illegally, given that she has the thinking skills of a pineapple?
Ok, her to pineapples was a bit insulting. To pineapples.
This is EXACTLY what happened. No way that she knew that it was a flag of Saudi Arabia. You were giving her too much credit, Matthew.
So much to this just doesn’t add up to me. Cool story though.
Additional meaningless point, but tracks with the rest of the inconsistencies, it is not a United Pilot posing in the picture.
It’s the United Express pilot, likely who flew him from IAH-ELP…
What else doesn’t add up to you?
That woman probably has no problem with the Jewish genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
If the response to 10/7 is a genocide, they’re bad at it. It is, however, a sloppy war fought with a lack of regard for civilians. People throw around words like apartheid and genocide because they’re emotional buzzwords.
No one ever accused a U.S. airline pilot of having awareness of the world. Certainly not in the way of understanding geopolitics and current state of affairs. Half of them, without their dispatchers and computers, would probably not even know what country their destination is located in.
The bigoted woman’s behavior disturbs me a little but I expected a lot better from the pilot.
Agreed!
You gotta stop giving airtime to people who say they were thrown off a plane for X reason. It’s usually a complicated reason why someone is removed from a flight and there are two sides to every story. I wasn’t here and you weren’t either. Let the airline get all the facts as they investigate which I’m sure they will – it may of not even had anything to do with the flag. Maybe there were some words said between the passengers? Who knows. I’m sure if it was just the flag then the airline will be sued. We have to stop taking a random social media post as truth and putting staff in bad light when we weren’t there and the airline hasn’t even given us the facts yet.
What you say is not untrue. And sage to a point. I would certainly agree in the context of the usual stuff between two passengers or blog ready bs. But this is different as to the story. The Captain of the aircraft decided he was not comfortable allowing the passenger to fly. I see no reason here as to why within the context. If there is another narrative where is it? Even if the two passengers had words, why? Why would any woman be uneasy with this? More so, why would any Captain of a commercial aircraft have an issue as well? I mean, outside of the guy telling the woman he was a terrorist or threatening the aircraft in any way how could having a Saudi flag for a sporting event he was promoting create a ruckus?
Yes, there may be more to this story. There probably is. But I doubt it in any way would defend a passenger being removed by a Captain. Because, if there was, it would already be published and out there.
The woman was probably just jealous because Saudi Arabia has a much cooler flag than her country.
Good. Those terrorist supporting autocrats are the scum of the earth. No surprise MBS Anis costing up to Israel which also funded Hamas, and kills a Palestinian children in the thousands prior to the start of the latest round of violence
Honestly if I was the captain I would’ve just thrown her off for being a nuisance. The greatest security threat on that flight was her disrupting everyone else’s peace and quiet.
Do we really think people like this lady are the people who are going to stop an attack? Remember the professor sometime in the 2010s who got interrogated because his seatmate thought differential equations were “strange foreign writing?” On the off chance that someone onboard was actually suspicious, this woman would’ve probably been too busy trying to get the flight attendant fired for not stowing her oversized carryon or starting the next air rage incident over seat reclining to notice.
AA should be renamed Soviet Airlines. Obviously AA doesy believe in The First Amendment.