JetBlue has been forced to make changes to its inflight maps and has dumped its current vendor of the popular passenger amenity after Jewish customers noticed that the State of Israel had been obliterated by a much larger place label describing the entire country as the ‘Palestinian Territories.’
Although JetBlue doesn’t even fly anywhere near Israel, JetBlue’s inflight map still has global coverage, and at least one passenger discovered the apparent snub to Israel.
The mistake then quickly went viral and JetBlue responded by launching a review into its third-party inflight map vendor. On Sunday, the New York-based carrier confirmed its review would see it dump its map vendor, at least temporarily, while the map label was fixed.
In the meantime, JetBlue said it would find a new map vendor to ensure that inflight maps reflected the place naming convention recommended by the US government.
“We’re sorry for the concern this has caused. We can assure you that no one on the JetBlue team was involved with drawing or labeling the map of the region and we were not previously aware of the issue,” a spokesperson for the airline told an Israeli media outlet on Sunday.
The statement from the airline continued: “After a careful review, we have decided to switch to a new map vendor. While our content provider works on making this transition, we have also asked the current vendor to adjust our onboard map so that it aligns with the U.S. government’s map guidance for the region. We are making these changes as quickly as the technology allows.”
In May, JetBlue said it would ban flight attendants and other customer-facing staff from wearing ‘Free Palestine’ pin badges after a Jewish customer accused the airline of antisemitism following a run-in with a crew member who was wearing the controversial pin badge.
Paul Faust, 54, was flying with JetBlue on a flight from Fort Lauderdale when he noticed a flight attendant wearing a ‘Free Palestine’ pin badge and decided to approach one of her colleagues to explain that Jewish passengers could find the badge offensive.
Faust says he thought the matter was over after expressing his opinion, but upon landing, he discovered that the airline had called the cops on him.
When Faust deboarded, the cops hadn’t yet arrived so he didn’t wait around but thought the matter was over. When he went to fly home with JetBlue, however, he discovered that JetBlue had canceled his ticket.
In the wake of the controversy, JetBlue accelerated its ongoing uniform review and quickly decided that customer-facing staff can only wear pin badges for countries or territories that the airline currently serves.
Several months after JetBlue’s pin badge review, Delta Air Lines also decided to ban staffers from wearing Palestine badges after accusations of antisemitism when a flight attendant was spotted wearing one of the badges.
It was initially reported that the flight attendant was breaking Delta’s uniform policy but it quickly transpired that the crew member wasn’t doing anything wrong.
Delta has, however, now banned flight attendants from wearing Palestine pin badges – a decision that angered the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) which is currently trying to unionize Delta’s crew members.
Last month, however, United Airlines decided not intervene when some passengers complained about seeing flight attendants wearing Palestine pin badges.
In a statement, the airline said its long-standing policy of allowing employees to wear flag pins that either designate a language they speak or which represent “pride in a place to which they may have a special connection” would remain in force.
That means that Palestine pin badges continue to be an option for United flight attendants to wear.
