For some mysterious reason, it has taken a full month to publicly identify the mad American Airlines passenger who delayed a flight for three hours with a crazed, “Final Destination”-style mid-plane rant declaring to her co-fliers that “You can sit on this plane and you can fucking die with them or not. I’m not going to.”
She is Tiffany Gomas, an unmarried, 38-year-old Dallas, Texas marketing executive who, we are told, resides in a 2 million dollar home. Gomas became a meme star from posted TikTok videos taken by the passengers she victimized with her still-unexplained meltdown. While the plane was preparing for take-off, she paced back and forth in the aisle shouting that “I’m telling you, I’m getting the fuck off and there’s a reason why I’m getting the fuck off and everyone can either believe it or they can not believe it.” She continued, “I don’t give two fucks, but I am telling you right now – that motherfucker back there is NOT real.You can sit on this plane and you can die with them or not. I’m not going to.”
Then she headed for the exit. Because of the disruption, everyone was forced to leave the plane, which was headed to Orlando, and was stuck in Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport for three hours.
Some reports still describe her as a marketing firm VP, but she left that job, and now runs her own firm, Uppercut Marketing. Since she was outed as the crazy person, the website for her firm has mysteriously vanished from the web as well as her social media presence. Although she tried repeatedly to re-board the plane in Dallas and refused to cooperate with authorities, it appears that no action has been taken against her. She has not been charged or arrested.
Or institutionalized.
We are seeing people being “cancelled” and losing their jobs for liking politically incorrect social media jokes, but a genuinely harmful and inexcusable episode like this appears to have minimal consequences. Assuming she isn’t genuinely deranged, Tiffany can quietly relaunch her marketing firm under a new name, and go on as if nothing happened.
One web wag smirked, “Pretty privilege is a thing. Don’t ever forget it.”
Some minor notes:
- Not that it matters, but the rant was reportedly triggered after she got in an argument with a passenger over earbuds.
- Did she really refer to the man who wasn’t real as “they”?
- If this had been a “Final Destination” movie, the plane would have crashed when it finally took off. I would not have reboarded that plane. I don’t believe in precognition, but I also don’t believe in betting my life on my certitude, either. There’s a reason I see all these movies.
Ethics Alarms 
“If this had been a “Final Destination” movie, the plane would have crashed when it finally took off. I would not have reboarded that plane. I don’t believe in precognition, but I also don’t believe in betting my life on my certitude, either. There’s a reason I see all these movies.”
Amusing human psychology thing there.
And here’s an episode that drives me crazy – my memory is completely failing me or I’m completely incompetent in doing a google search – but I swear I saw the following experiment conducted on people:
There were two empty and clean plastic jars – like you might store liquid medicine in. There were no labels on them. Then, in view of the tested individual, they poured both jars with water from the same pitcher and asked the tested individual to take a drink from one. They did. Then they affixed a “poison” label on the other bottle that had just had water poured into it. Most tested individuals refused to drink out of that one.
Despite witnessing clean water they’d just proofed themselves and their own reason.
The only reason I feel like that experiment actually happened is I don’t think my brain can make up something like that. But I can’t find it. So maybe I did make it up.
No real ethics comment, just an editorial observation that “meltdown” is an excellent word choice with a dual meaning when the immediate and long range weather forecasts for DFW predict high temperatures there between 100 and 110 degrees.
Oh — and I’ll be flying AA from DFW to Orlando this weekend. Wish me luck.
No question that being pretty has its privileges, but I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt here. Without all the facts, I am going to speculate that she has a mental illness and either A) forgot her meds or B) her meds need to be adjusted. It’s terribly inconvenient for all the passengers on the plane, but we cannot screen mentally ill people and keep them off the plane. The airline must’ve been convinced that this episode was a result of her illness and let it go quietly. Sometimes the way of compassion is better.
Now, if we find out she’s just an entitled jerk, I’ll admit I was wrong.
It has nothing to do with being pretty; it has everything to do with being part of the most privileged class in the US: affluent white women (and especially among them the liberal/progressive/lefty ones)
They are the ones that I call the “Lululemon Warriors”…
Is there a limit to this compassion? There’s an immigrant to Canada who cut his passengers head off and ate portions of the unlucky fellow bus ticket holder while everyone was waiting for authorities to handle the mental breakdown.
Consequences amounted to brief institutionalization and lifetime medications… But definitely not pretty and rich.
She’s lucky her outburst didn’t include phrases that could have landed in “terroristic threats” territory.
There’s obviously a tipping point here. Someone whose mental breakdown involves murdering and cannibalizes someone is clearly dangerous and must be incarcerated either in prison or in an institution.
Her outburst, though unpleasant, did not involve murdering or even assaulting another person. She just paced back and forth, yelling obscenities and imagining a man where there was one and tried to exit the plane.
Tangentially related, is this pilot’s speech ethical? Or an abuse of authority?
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4139282-pilot-lectures-passengers-in-viral-pre-flight-speech-hes-fed-up-with-all-these-childish-adults/
-Jut
Southwest is well known for their more entertaining pre-flight lectures than the boilerplate federally required ones.
Captains and pilots are temporary dictators of their realm during the voyage and for very good reasons. This doesn’t seem like a leaders’ speech, it seems like surrender and I would feel less safe on the voyage than if only briefly glimpsed visually during boarding.
I suspect she is gonna catch all kinds of social media and online hell. That might be punishment enough under the circumstances.
jvb
This has not been a good year for women marketing executives, of whom there are evidently a great many.
I feel like this situation could not have come out more wrong if someone tried to fuck it up harder.
Why do we know her name?
I mean, really…. We’re not even saying she’s -ist, or -phobic. This isn’t the craziest behavior I’ve seen online today. In a sane world, she would have been escorted out, charges may or may not have been laid, but she would have been banned from flying ever again, she might have gotten a referral to a therapist, and we would have moved on. Because we’re pretty obviously seeing someone not thinking clearly at what’s probably one of the lower points of her life (to date).
None of that happened.
What happened instead was that instead of facing systemic repercussions, she was put on the internet, made into a meme, let go from her job, and prevented from making future earnings. I should not know her name. I should not know how big her house is. And yet I do.
1. Wait—was she let go from her job? I looked for that. My info said that she ran her own firm. Of course, she may be nuts, so she might have fired herself.
2. At this point, isn’t it futile and Canute-like to complain about everyone having a cell phone and every public misconduct or mistake ending up posted somewhere? Didn’t the Central Park dog walking mess settle that for all time? We probably shouldn’t know George Floyd’s name either
1. I think I’m wrong. My impression on the order of operations here was that the video came out, she was fired from her job as a marketing VP, she then started an independent company, until she was identified as the person in the video, when she went incognito with the new company. I got there by misinterpreting this line: “Some reports still describe her as a marketing firm VP, but she left that job, and now runs her own firm, Uppercut Marketing.” I had assumed the timeframe here was all post-video-coming-out and that “left” was a euphemism for “we don’t know that she was fired, but she was probably fired”.