A US airliner has been diverted after a row broke out over one passenger’s use of a device to prevent the seat in front of him from reclining.<\/p>\n
A male and female passenger were involved in a heated dispute on Sunday, after the male passenger attached a Knee Defender to his seat.<\/p>\n
The argument forced the United Airlines flight from Newark to Denver to make an unscheduled stop in Chicago.<\/p>\n
Police investigated the incident but said it was a customer service issue.<\/p>\n
The passengers involved were reported to be sitting in the Economy Plus section of the plane, which already provides an extra four inches (10cm) of leg room.<\/p>\n
Unruly behaviour<\/strong><\/p>\n The fight began when the male passenger, seated in a middle seat of row 12, used the Knee Defender to stop the woman in front of him from reclining while he used his laptop, officials said.<\/p>\n A flight attendant asked him to remove the device – a small piece of plastic costing $21.95 (\u00a313.25) which slots onto the tray table – but he refused.<\/p>\n The woman reacted by standing up, turning around and throwing a cup of water at him.<\/p>\n The flight crew then made the decision to divert the plane to Chicago, where police were waiting to meet it.<\/p>\n Under US law, the passengers, both 48, could have been fined for unruly behaviour.<\/p>\n But police decided the incident was not a threat to aviation security.<\/p>\n Despite this, the passengers were not allowed to continue onto Denver.<\/p>\n ‘Be courteous’<\/strong><\/p>\n The US Federal Aviation Administration has said it is up to individual airlines to set rules about whether they allow the use of the Knee Defender on flights.<\/p>\n Most major US airlines, including United Airlines, have banned the device.<\/p>\n Its inventor, Ira Goldman, has said people should be courteous and tell the passenger sitting in front of them when they are using a Knee Defender.<\/p>\n “The Knee Defender says right on it: ‘Be courteous. Do not hog space. Listen to the flight crew.’ Apparently that is not what happened here,” he told USA Today.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A US airliner has been diverted after a row broke out over one passenger’s use of a device to prevent the seat in front of him from reclining. A male and female passenger were involved in a heated dispute on Sunday, after the male passenger attached a Knee Defender to his seat. The argument forced […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":42240,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[7],"class_list":["post-42236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-togbe-afede-xiv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}