A United Airlines flight attendant at Tampa International Airport was arrested just moments before he was due to board a flight after a crew member at another airline accused him of touching her on the shoulder.
The incident came to light after a YouTube channel only recently obtained bodycam footage from the police officers who responded to the incident on March 8, 2025, igniting a debate over who was to blame.
The United flight attendant was removed from a flight with just minutes to spare and then taken into custody over an allegation that he tapped a fellow crew member Cayman Airways on the shoulder and moved her ID badge so that he could take a photo of it.
So what was the dispute all about? Apparently, the United flight attendant was irritated that his peer was talking loudly on speakerphone while on the employee shuttle between the parking lot and the airport terminal.
“I was talking on the phone with my uncle and he called me ‘oh, your voice,’ i was like, okay, so I go outside and I was still talking to my uncle,” the Cayman Airways crew member told the responding police officers.
“He came for me and was like ‘close your mouth.’ I was like, ‘why are you bothering me, are you racist?'”
The United flight attendant then allegedly tapped the crew member on the shoulder and threatened to try to get her terminated, while taking a photo of her ID badge.
On being approached by the police officers, the United flight attendant admits to touching the other crew member so that he could get her attention and tell her to be quiet on the employee shuttle.
“I was in the bus shelter, she’s screaming on the phone, I said ‘can you turn the phone off,’ she calls me a racist over and over, she flips me off with her fingers, she tells me to ‘go f**k myself’ and I said, ‘all we need is quiet in the shelter, quiet on the bus.'”
He then admits to following her in the airport because he wanted to get her details and report her behavior to the airline.
The flight attendant repeatedly accepts that he touched the crew member on the shoulder, to which one of the responding police officers tells him that this is technically a battery.
Were the police desperate for an arrest? You have to wonder whether this was an appropriate use of police resources and whether some discretion could have been used.
As a result of what appears to be a fairly minor disagreement over the annoying use of speakerphones in a public environment, United would no doubt have been scrambling to find a new crew member to work a flight or face a delay affecting many passengers.
On the other hand, there is an argument that no matter how frustrated you are with the behavior of someone else, it’s never appropriate to lay hands on another person, and sometimes you just have to keep your opinion to yourself.
What do you think? Was the United flight attendant in the right to challenge his fellow crew member?
