Delta Weaponizes Moana
Mike Leitao ~ 06/04/2025
Flying is not a fun experience. Getting through airport security is always a hassle, people turn into brain dead idiots at the gates lining up when they are boarding group 7 because they need to get to their already assigned seat to sit in for some reason, there are always delays, they seem to constantly overbook planes, turbulence can be annoying, crying babies, tiny seats turned tinier by people reclining all the way back like they are already at a resort. The list could go on and on and probably be an entire article all on its own, but the point is that flying is very rarely, if ever, a truthfully enjoyable experience from start to finish for most people other than those rich enough to always fly first class or private. So with all the other annoyances that happen on flights, the last thing anyone, both airline companies and passengers, want is for a new inconvenience or annoyance to pop up that ruins experiences even more. A few days ago that happened to a number of people on a Delta airline.
The story is pretty well known but for those who don’t know allow me to explain. A Delta flight to Orlando got delayed about 2 hours due to bad weather in Orlando at the time. During the delay, for some bizarre reason, a Delta flight attendant allowed a 12-year-old girl to get on the intercom and sing Moana across the entire plane. This wasn’t one line of a song, but a full two minute long song. That is basically the background needed. So where does one start with this insane scenario? I’m going to start with the poor decision to board people. I’m not a pilot or work in the aviation industry, so I don’t know how the decisions for boarding and takeoff and delays and all that shit work. What I do know is that if I’m going to be delayed, I’d much rather do it in the airport than in the plane. Being stuck for two hours sucks, but doing it in the airport where I can sit in a decently comfortable chair, I’m in air conditioning, and there are places to grab food or even just an area to walk around in can make the delay much less stressful and annoying. Replace that with being crammed into your tiny seat, no leg room, no air conditioning so it’s just hot and stuffy and miserable. By having the plane boarded, you have already created a more stressful and uncomfortable environment for everyone on that flight meaning any additional annoyances are going to be met with harsher responses. If this happened in the airport I guarantee people would be annoyed still, but much less annoyed.
Hopping off Delta for a second, let’s talk about the parents of this girl and the actual girl herself. Starting with the girl, I’m not going to beat up this random kid, although I think she was old enough to be able to read the room and see a lot of annoyance and frustration and decide not to do this. It would be unfair to heavily blame her. At the end of the day, she was probably hoping to lighten moods and instead will forever be known as the Moana girl. Now on to the parents. Those I have no problem ripping into. Parenting is hard, no one said it isn’t. But one thing that seems super easy as a parent is to not allow your child to put themselves into a stupid situation that will cause them to be hurt. The fact that the parents either allowed and reinforced her to go do this or just were straight up ignoring her instead of being responsible and telling her not to because people are currently stressed and in bad moods and will not be receptive to that action is ridiculous. Those parents have essentially allowed their daughter to be bullied online now for days on end and have probably traumatized her. I’m sure in a few years that will lead to a very great relationship between them and her. Classic parenting fail resulting in too much negativity shown towards the child and nowhere near enough for the parents.
Ok, that was a long enough break from Delta, let’s go back to them. Similarly to the parents fucking up, we need to talk about the flight attendant who fucked up. They really had this girl come up asking to do that and you are telling me this adult who sees people flying all the time so understands how people on planes normally are couldn’t properly read the room to know that was a bad idea? Similarly to the parents, this flight attendant is not getting hate for the fact that they had all the power in the world to say “no” but instead made everyone endure it. I hope they were properly disciplined by Delta, but I doubt it. Now we need to talk about some more specifics around the situation which added to how awful this ended up being. For Delta, when the intercom is being used it pauses all media and headphones that are currently plugged into the tvs on the seats. So anyone who was at least trying to watch a movie to pass the time had their audio cut and their music or sound muted solely to hear this girl sing a song for two minutes. When tempers are high and the only distraction you have is trying to watch a movie to make it go by quicker and that gets taken away from you, it’s easy to see why people were so mad, these flyers were basically taken hostage.
So this is pretty clearly bad for Delta, since not only is their name attached to this incident but there are clearly parts of it (boarding and then being delayed on the plane, the flight attendant allowing this to happen) that are their fault. This is where you need marketing and all that shit to step in and make sure you do what you have to try and quiet the negativity and bad press. Now, because marketing is easy, this is a pretty easy task. It’s very easy to simply issue a statement that sounds something like this: “Delta apologizes for the delay for the flight to Orlando and an unauthorized user on the intercom taking away from people’s media during the stressful delay. Delta has internally taken measures to ensure this does not happen in the future and those directly involved in the situation have been spoken to.” Nice and easy, you take responsibility, apologize for it, explain that action was taken to avoid it in the future, and make sure people are aware that those responsible have been spoken to. It would have been that easy to give a statement like this and give it a couple days and this would have all been over by now. But no, Delta decided to go the stupid route. This was the official statement by Delta: “We appreciate the customer sharing her talents and apologize to our customers for the delay in their travels.” I’m sorry, are we serious right now? The statement needed to do four things: take responsibility, apologize, reprimand those responsible, and take actions to avoid in the future. They did one of those things, and barely. They technically apologized, but without the first part around taking responsibility the apology means nothing. They essentially praised this girl, inviting more people to do this type of shit because why wouldn’t they, there is clearly no downside. I gotta assume Delta has people on social media and if so they would’ve seen the fact that everything on social media is showing this event as a huge negative for them, and they basically said “fuck that” and doubled down making them look even worse. So, the moral of the story is this; flying sucks, but it sucks even more on Delta so fly literally anything else instead and it will suck slightly less.
