'Plane passenger demanded I moved during flight – and was backed by others'

Travelling by plane can be a draining experience, and the last thing you need is a dispute over seating arrangements.

Seat rows on planes are not uncommon. Sometimes mums with babies want to sit in a seat that's more appropriate for them, or you might find that there's been an unfortunate case of the airline double booking the same seat so someone's left short.

Most of the time, these seat disputes occur before the plane takes off and are resolved by flight attendants long before you have to spend hours in the sky.

One man, however, was left facing a different kind of seat row after a passenger demanded she sit in his seat halfway through an eight-hour flight and called him "incredibly rude" for refusing.

The man explained he and his wife were flying from Dublin to Washington DC and had been assigned the window seat and the middle seat in a row.

When they boarded, it turned out that the passenger who booked the aisle seat in their row didn't show up, so they ended up bagging themselves the entire row.

To give themselves more space, the man moved to the aisle seat and the couple spread their belongings out on the spare seat.

But halfway through the flight, a woman came up to them and "announced" she would be taking the middle seat so that she could escape a crying baby several rows behind.

In a dramatic tale shared on Reddit, a man recounted: "Nothing eventful happened for the first 4.5 hours of the flight. Randomly, the passenger from the aisle seat across from me comes over with her friend who was sitting a few rows back and ANNOUNCES that her friend would now be taking the middle seat to get away from a crying baby further back. She did not ask she told us this was happening. There were about three hours of flight time remaining."

To avoid confrontation, the man summoned a flight attendant to resolve the unexpected seat claim. The cabin crew member clarified that while the woman could "take an available seat", she wasn't entitled to "disrupt anyone's seating arrangements" and therefore couldn't commandeer the middle seat or insist the man vacate his aisle spot.

The man added: "The woman then starts b****ing about how I was assigned the middle but then moved to the aisle before takeoff, so I shouldn't even have that aisle seat. I had been sitting there for almost five hours and we had already distributed our items all over the row."

After a brief disappearance to consult another flight attendant, the woman returned only to berate the man, proclaiming: "The woman and her friend disappear to talk to another flight attendant for about five minutes.

"The woman across the aisle then came back to her seat and proceeded to yell at me saying that 'her friend would not be sitting there not because she was not allowed to, but because I was so incredibly rude' and that I was a 'f***ing a**hole'."

Users commenting on the post agreed that the man acted appropriately by speaking to a flight attendant at once. However, some argued that his behaviour could be considered disrespectful as he and his wife had not paid for the third seat they were occupying.

One individual remarked: "They should have asked politely, but you paid for two seats and had the benefit of three for most of the flight, and you were not actually entitled to hog all three seats while somebody else suffered.

"It would have been fair to decide which of the three seats you would let her have, but refusing her a seat because her friend was rude was an asshole move, and the flight attendant shouldn't have let you do that."

Another person chimed in with: "I understand it wasn't convenient and you had already spread yourselves all over the empty seat. However, technically you had only paid for one seat, so if a seat is empty and a passenger wants to move at any point during a flight (especially for a valid reason like a crying baby), they should be able to."