A woman said she had been left “humiliated” by United Airlines after flight crew members tried to get her to remove her son’s ventilator ahead of takeoff. Melissa Sotomayor posted a video on TikTok that has received over 1.2 million views where she claimed the flight crew on a trip from Tampa, Florida to Newark, New Jersey , tried to make her detach her son from his medical equipment it so the plane could take off.
United said it had contacted the mother and apologised after the incident, but did not provide any further details. “This message is for United Airlines. The way that you treated my son when we were attempting to fly home from Tampa to Newark was absolutely ridiculous,” Sotomayor said in an almost 10-minute TikTok video.
Ms Sotomayor explained that her one-year-old son is “medically complex” and depends on a ventilator and a tracheostomy tube. Her son was born prematurely at 22 weeks. Before she boarded the flight, Ms Sotomayor said she obtained documentation so her son could fly to their destination.
On the first leg of their trip to Tampa, she said she did not encounter any issues, and shared the documents with the airline who also cleared her sons’s medical equipment with no issues. However, upon their 8 March return trip, she claimed a flight attendant told her she would need to make the medical equipment, including the ventilator and a portable oxygen concentrator, secure for takeoff, asking for her son to be taken off them. Ms Sotomayor explai.
