Air Canada dealing with complaints of alleged sexual assault at 35,000 feet

What do you do when you’re careening 10 km above the earth in a metal tube with wings and someone inappropriately touches you?

It’s a pertinent question given Air Canada faces a second complaint over its alleged handling of sexual assaults in just two days.

An Ontario woman claims she saw a man touch a sleeping female teenager on a flight from L.A. to Toronto in January. The news follows yesterday’s call out by a New Brunswick woman that Air Canada didn’t do enough when she complained about the man in the seat next to her touching her inappropriately.

“They handled it very poorly,” the woman, who can’t be named because of a publication ban, told the CBC. “They basically blamed me for not causing enough of a scene. And said they didn’t understand the severity of it when I approached the stewardess.”

Air Canada spokesman Peter Fitzpatrick can’t comment on the woman’s case which is still before the courts, but he told Yahoo Canada “if situations arise where customers need assistance aboard an aircraft, they should alert a flight attendant.”

“Flight attendants are very well-trained to address a wide range of situations,” wrote Fitzpatrick in an emailed response. “However, customers can also ask for the in-charge flight attendant, who is introduced at the start of each flight.

While the Canadian Union of Public Employees’ (CUPE) website for the Air Canada flight attendants says staff are trained to deal with air rage and unruly passengers, sexual assault isn’t mentioned specifically.

However, in the most recent cases, the situation was dealt with by moving the offended passenger to another seat and upon landing or shortly thereafter, contacting the local police who took statements from witnesses and the alleged victim and accused.

But Fred Lazar, an aviation analyst and professor at the Schulich School of Business, says the incident may be a canary for a wider systemic problem.

“Airlines are operating with higher load factors which means more people are being squeezed together and secondly they’re squeezing more seats in these planes which means each person now has less room,” says Lazar. “So you’re going to put more and more people in uncomfortable positions.”

The challenges of passenger rights are further compounded by the confined situation. In a situation where another passenger or the flight attendant actually sees the incident, they can respond accordingly. But if there aren’t any witnesses, it becomes trickier to handle.

“You can’t throw the passenger off because you don’t know whether the passenger did in fact engage in that behaviour,” he says. “All you can say is whoever was offended or claims that he or she was touched inappropriately should file a claim or start a suit once they land at their destination.”

The flight attendant can make a record of it and inform the authorities then leave the authorities to follow the law. He points out that although the pilot is considered the law when the plane is in the air, options are slim.

“What’s a pilot going to do at that point? You can’t restrain an individual unless the person is actively engaged in that type of behaviour,” says Lazar. “In that case a pilot can demand that that passenger be removed to another part of the plane and be restrained but if the person is cooperative and denies it, well what can you do in that circumstance?”

If the passenger feels the airline inadequately handled the complaint, they may lodge a formal complaint with Transport Canada about the carrier via the Civil Aviation Issues Reporting System.

Ultimately, Lazar expect incidents like the alleged passenger groping on Air Canada flights will become more prevalent.

“As airlines try to maintain high load factors and squeeze on more seats you’re going to have a lot more of these incidences,” says Lazar. “There may be legitimate complaints but how do you decide at the spur of the moment if someone’s complaint is legitimate or just a function of someone trying to squeeze into a seat and inadvertently touching someone else?”