The high-school seniors were being unruly and refusing to sit down

Jun 5, 2013 07:16 GMT  ·  By

Roughly 100 seniors in high-school at Yeshiva of Flatbush, in Brooklyn were kicked off a flight from New York City.

The airline staff asked the students to leave the plane over unruly behavior. The NY Post detailed that they were standing up instead of sitting and fastening their seat belts.

They were also refusing to turn off their cellphones, a standard requirement for any aircraft to take off.

The incident took place at 6 a.m. on Monday, June 3 and the students were booted off an AirTran flight. They were supposed to leave LaGuardia Airport in New York for Atlanta.

The kids' chaperones were also asked to disembark after the flight was grounded, sitting at the gate for 45 minutes as flight attendants asked the students to sit down. The captain also stepped in and tried to reason with the teens.

"The point at which the captain comes on the PA system and says, 'You all need to sit down,' is unusual," comments Brad Hawkins, a spokesman for Southwest Airlines which owns AirTran.

"I have no indication that the flight attendants overreacted," Hawkins argued, mentioning that they are conducting an investigation into what happened.

Flight attendants cite "repeated requests" for the students to turn off their phones so that the plane can take off.

School officials noted that the seniors were on their way to Atlanta for a three-day class trip. They were scheduled to visit the Six Flags amusement park and go rafting.

"Preliminarily, it does not appear that the action taken by the flight crew was justified," said Yeshiva executive director Rabbi Seth Linfield, after speaking to the adults on the trip.

The seniors were offered other flights to Atlanta, and the voyage took as much as 12 hours for some of them. They also received vouchers for free travels.