A woman has revealed what happened when passengers on her flight were asked to remain seated so that those at risk of missing their connecting flight could get off first.
Janelle Rupkalvis is a travel influencer who flies with Delta and regularly shares tips and clips of her adventures on social media across multiple platforms under the handle janelleonajet. One video in particular has been gaining a lot of attention lately, revolving around an incident that occurred last year when she was trying to catch a connecting flight on a trip from LAX to Barcelona, Spain.
Rupkalvis’ first flight was hit by significant delays, leaving her little to no time to catch her connecting flight at JFK Airport in New York.
“The time between my connections dropped from two hours to about four or five minutes,” she said Newsweek.
janelleonajet/TikTok
While several people on the plane had already missed their connection, Rupkalvis was one of the few who still had a small window of time, but she had to hurry.
“We had one chance to make it,” she said. “There were maybe four or five flights with extremely tight connections. You have to sprint to make it.”
What happened after landing was all the more frustrating. Air travel can be stressful. Expedia’s Travel Hacks 2024 report found that 55 percent of Americans consider it a “leading cause of stress.”
Maybe that’s why everyone reacted to Rupkalvis’ flight the way they did. She said flight attendants repeatedly asked passengers to remain seated if they didn’t have a connecting flight. Her pleas fell on deaf ears.
“Everyone stood up,” said Rupkalvis. “Nobody stayed seated.”
Sitting in the front row, she recalled having to fight her way through the “crowds” in front of her as passengers disembarked at the back of the plane.
“I said very clearly, ‘I’m on one of those tight connections, let me through,'” she said.
While some people made room for her and tried to get through, others were apparently unaware of her plight. Rupkalvis captured the chaos that followed in a video on TikTok, which shows her repeatedly having to push her way through passengers who were disembarking the plane at a leisurely pace.
“Some passengers took up the entire jetway and just walked around casually,” she recalls.
Rupkalvis can still remember the events that followed.
“These connections were so tight that if you didn’t sprint to your gate, you had no chance of making it,” she said. “We were a group of 10 and 15 people sprinting through and weaving between people who were also trying to sprint past that group.”
Their efforts were in vain.
“We missed the flight by a minute or two and there was no other flight until the next day,” she said.
Rupkalvis believes there was no reason for so many people to get up, as “not every person had a tight connecting flight,” but concludes that “unfortunately, people at the airport tend to look after themselves.”
Newsweek has reached out to Delta for comment on their process for situations like this, but had not received a response at the time of writing. However, Rupkalvis has some suggestions on how things could be improved. He suggests that flight attendants “ask people to raise their hand” when trying to catch a connecting flight.
“It’s helpful when airlines have passengers raise their hands on their connecting flights so everyone can look around and see each other,” Rupkalvis said. “It’s better if the flight attendants have some kind of control. In my experience, if you leave it up to the passengers, they don’t listen and just get off as normal.”
She just hopes that the video documenting her experience will encourage people to do the right thing.
“Making a connection can make the difference between someone making it to an important event,” she said. “Be kind to other passengers and follow the crew’s instructions.”
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