It’s not often that a passenger throws the chief flight attendant off a flight but that’s the scenario that led to a recent Korean Airlines flight leaving JFK late. Of course it wasn’t just any passenger. Cho Hyun-Ah (who goes by Heather Cho), the family-run airline’s executive vice president and daughter of CEO Cho Yang-Ho, became incensed when, as the aircraft was being pushed back for a scheduled departure to Incheon, a junior flight attendant brought her a package of macadamia nuts. Cho, who, until she resigned the post on Tuesday, was in charge of the “in-flight experience” at the airline, gave her fellow passengers an experience most won’t soon forget.
The young flight attendant transgressed two points in the airline service manual. For one, Cho hadn’t ordered any nuts and secondly the nuts arrived in their foil wrapper rather than in a dish. The newbie got to continue to Seoul, however. Cho decided that the flagrant violation of company policy was the responsibility of the chief flight attendant. If the boss couldn’t get the nut service right, she reasoned, how could he or she be responsible for the safe conduct of 250 passengers on the 13-hour flight. The captain apparently agreed and headed back to the gate where the chief flight attendant was offloaded. The plane was 11 minutes late landing in Seoul. Opposition members of the Korean government have called for an investigation but the airline has defended Cho, saying that given her job description, she was correct to “raise a problem in service.” But after a social media campaign that called the airline “Air Nuts” started to hurt ticket sales early this week, Cho resigned the customer service post (she kept the VP job) with an apology.”I am sorry for causing trouble to the passengers and the people,” she said in a statement.
