Flight Canceled after young child refuses to sit down and buckle seatbelt

"We apologize for the effect this had on other passengers..."

Airline travel is not the glamorous affair it once was. Gone are the days of an empty neighboring seat, meal service and joy all replaced by resentment and low-grade rage. Oh but imagine how that fury would have bubbled and broiled had you had been sitting on Porter Airlines flight PD444 with service from Victoria International Airport to Toronto late last week.

Let’s say you had just enjoyed a surf at Tofino, the British Columbian gem some 300 clicks to the west, and were satisfied but very tired, looking forward to getting back to the 6ix. You settle in, maybe put headphones on and feel that sweet relief as the plane pulls away from the gate.

Then nothing.

No engine roar, no feeling of lift. You are just sitting there, on the tarmac, waiting.

At issue, a “young child standing in their seat who would not secure their seatbelt.”

Porter Airlines explained, “Attempts by the accompanying parent and crew to address this were unsuccessful. The aircraft could not take off in this unsafe condition, so the crew elected to return to the terminal and have the passengers disembark.”

By then, it was too late and so all passengers had to wait until nearly 11:00 PM, the next night, to fly.

“We apologize for the effect this had on other passengers, who were able to depart on a flight the following day,” Porter Airlines added.

So on a scale of 1 – 10 how furious would you have been? Would you have invectives fly at child? At parents?

Or would you have been charitable and thought the child might have sensed something and saved all the passengers from a crash?

I was flying from Detroit to San Diego, recently, and the flight had to return to the gate after a woman was deemed too high, I think, to fly. Security came on and it was a big ordeal but she, and two others in her party, eventually de-planed. All in all it wasted about an hour but I was hopping.

Do you have any stories?