California family with two toddlers booted from Delta flight over seat

LOS ANGELES — Delta Air Lines is offering refunds and compensation to a California family that said they were forced off a plane and threatened with jail after refusing to give up one of their seats on a flight.

A video of the April 23 incident was uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday and added to the list of recent encounters on airlines that have gone viral, including the dragging of a bloodied passenger off a United Express plane.

Brian and Brittany Schear of Huntington Beach, Calif., told KABC-TV that they were returning from Hawaii with their two toddlers. They wanted to put one of the children in a seat they had bought for their 18-year-old son, who instead flew home on an earlier flight.

Delta says on its website that tickets cannot be transferred and name changes are not allowed. Federal regulations do not bar changing the name on a ticket as long as the new passenger’s name can be run through a database before the flight, according to a Transportation Security Administration spokesman.

By late Thursday afternoon, Delta still had not explained why the Schears were removed from the plane. A spokesman said the flight was not overbooked.

On the video, Brian Schear can be heard talking with a person off-camera — it is not clear whether that person is a Delta employee.

After Schear says that he won’t leave, the person off-camera replies, “You and your wife will be in jail … it’s a federal offense if you don’t abide” by an airline crew’s order.

Schear suggests that his wife could hold one of the toddlers during takeoff and then put the youngster in the car seat.