In a case of unbridled entitlement, a miffed former Israeli president stole the seat of a flight attendant on a recent flight when he was not allowed to sit next to a colleague.
Former Israel President Reuven Rivlin resorted to huffing around the cabin and taking a flight attendant’s seat when he was unable to sit next to a colleague on a recent El Al flight from Dubai. Rivlin, who served as Israel’s president from 2014 to 2021, fell victim to a series of scheduling challenges when the Israeli airline El Al consolidated three flights into one.
Apparently, the seating arrangements became discombobulated after the airline adjusted flight schedules due to ongoing security challenges in Dubai. As a result, the former president, who’d booked business class seats on his party’s original flight, didn’t end up with the seats he desired.
According to a report, Rivlin behaved childishly, was extremely irritable, and spoke dismissively and rudely towards the flight crew. The report noted that after being informed that he could not sit next to his colleague, he stormed to the back of the plane taking the seat of a flight attendant there, before then coming back up to the front of the plane to steal that flight attendant’s seat. All the while, his security detail was in tow.
While no official comment from the former president has been released yet, the aforementioned report said that someone close to the president believes that while he was angry he had behaved in a restrained manner.
Over the past several months, El Al, the flagship airline for the nation-state of Israel, has been plagued with security challenges on flights originating and terminating from Dubai. Earlier in the month, the airline announced it was scaling back flight operations out of Dubai after disagreements over various security issues. The resulting chaos from these scaled back operations remains a challenge for passengers to and from the two countries.
