Boycott Lufthansa: Removed Passenger from Flight for Wearing a Medical Mask

If you care about your health, do not fly Lufthansa. You might be booted from the plane for wearing a mask. And if you have friends or family who are immunocompromised, such as being on chemo, tell them to avoid Lufthansa and boycott Lufthansa in solidarity.

The incident below in some ways resembles the forced removal of an elderly dentist, Dr. Dao, from a United flight years back, in which Dr. Dao was knocked out and had his jaw broken. While there was no violence here, the nature of rule-breaking was similar, and in some ways worse. In Dr. Doa’s case, he was merely arbitrarily told to get off the plane after he had taken his seat and tried to demur. Here, the crew claimed that a passenger’s medical mask made them “uncomfortable,” although as we’ll soon see, the fact set is borderline bizarre. The idea that the fact of masking could bother airline crew is not credible given that Lufthansa required passengers to wear masks at least through July 2021.¹

Lufthansa is a code-sharing partner with United. We asked the Lufthansa press office whether it was their policy to refuse seating to passengers wearing medical masks. We did not receive a reply.

Keep in mind that the agreement that governs your ticket, the airline’s Contract of Carriage, typically gives the carrier lots of leeway in terms of not boarding passengers even if they have a confirmed seat.² However, once a passenger is seated, the Contract of Carriage generally limits the basis for removal to disruptive behavior and posing a danger. As we’ll see, Lufthansa’s is typical and hence would not justify removing a passenger for wearing a medical mask.

To give some background, we’ll turn to the notorious case of Dr. Dao, a 69 year old dentist who was knocked unconscious, and had his nose broken and two teeth knocked out when private security goons in the employ of the airport removed him. The press almost universally, and inaccurately, depicted United as having the right to remove seated passengers to remedy an overbooking problem. Similarly, the press ignored that four United personnel, who’d apparently missed a connection or worse had been misbooked, showed up at the gate at the last minute, after passengers had boarded, and were the reason for ejecting Dr. Dao to free up a seat.

Now to the mask incident. By e-mail from a reader well known to the site:

So it finally happened — I got taken off the flight for wearing a mask.

Trying to go home to visit my mom, who we have managed to keep COVID free still to this day, so the same protocol that was kept us safe for five years was followed. But the tolerance towards it is gone now apparently…

I think I told you a story about them being very aggressive about it a couple years ago, well, this time they starting harassing me about it from the start, I told them to leave me alone and to go do whatever they have to actually do as their job and to stop bothering me, and then the captain came and said that I was “making the crew uncomfortable” and they will either physically remove me or rebook me to another flight and route. The latter would have meant spending an additional day at various airports, so I refused, and then they indeed came with a cop.

Then I had a long conversation with the cops explaining to them what happened, they said I didn’t really do anything wrong but Lufthansa as a private company can do whatever they want (what about the contract that is the ticket?) and this is “tresspassing”, etc. I said to them that I have a strong suspicion the flight was fully booked (indeed, every single seat was taken) and Lufthansa was looking for a way to kick someone out, they nodded silently, and that was it…

The notion that the flight crew was being aggressive turns out not to be a stretch. In response to my quire for more detail:

They didn’t ask me to remove it, they were just very aggressively asking me why I am wearing it, with questions implying I had a mental health problem. I told them to leave me alone and stop bothering me, they came back, I told them that I am not an idiot, but a professional who knows very well what he is doing, and that they should also go back to doing their job, which certainly does not feature harassing passengers, they continued. All that time I am sitting motionless and silent in the seat, thus “causing disruption” is just out of the question, but then they came telling me I am making them “uncomfortable” and should be taken out the plane and rerouted. I categorically refused because I had paid for this flight, not for the other one and for sitting at airports for another 12-24 hours, and also because the whole thing was so surreal I couldn’t believe they were serious. Then they came with police…

The scheme was effectively to deliberately provoke even a mild reaction to persistent pestering, then use that as justification for further action and escalation. And I did not wise up to that on time…

So it looks like the staff set out to go after a masked passenger, apparently hoping he’d get stroopy if they pushed hard enough, which is exactly what happened. This might just seem like a case of a crew member for some reason taking a dislike to our hapless reader and acting on it (which is hardly the sort of behavior that should be exhibited in any customer service business), except this was not the first time that this has happened to our abused reader.

So an alternative hypothesis is that Lufthansa sees masked passengers as bad for business, but for some reason sees asking them to remove their masks as a less effective way to get rid of them and might also risk alienating passengers who heard the interaction.

Conor featured tweets in today’s Llinks from Yasha Levine on how unmasked firefighters are, per the New York Times, “getting sick and dying from toxic wildfire smoke.” Is this issue the real one for Lufthansa, that they see any masked passenger as a warning that it might not be safe to fly unprotected, and that message is verboten?

But on the flip side, how likely is it that an airline would boot a paying passenger over masking unless they had another body to fill that seat? There is no way to know, but if an oversold flight was a the scenario, then the crew picked a fight to justify removal without compensation. Another alternative is a VIP customer was waitlisted.

A regular Lufthansa business class customer did note that Lufthansa flight personnel are heavy-handed, and speculated that German affinity for conformity might have a lot to do with the hostility to a masked passenger. Any readers who know the ins and out of airline practice are encouraged to speak up.

Regardlessy, this stinks. So we have the this lame excuse about making the crew “uncomfortable”? So do they also intrusively interrogate amputees? Men in turbans? Thalidomide victims? Passengers with disfigured faces?

The relevant sections from Lufthansa’s 2025 Contract of Carriage. First is the opening part of Article 7; the balance refers to issues not in play here like refusing security checks, not paying the applicable ticket price, not having needed travel documents, violating safety rules, and smoking on the plane:

The only potentially relevant section is: “may adversely affect the safety and security, the health or wellbeing of other passengers to a significant degree.” But it was the crew that claimed they were “uncomfortable”. That’s not passengers.

More generally, how can mask wearing possibly “adversely affect…wellbeing…to a significant degree”? Is the new standard that the public at large must be subjected to the lowest common denominator neuroses of individuals? This is the reverse of the traditional model of mental health, where one purpose of therapy was to have the therapist tell the patient (politely) that certain things, such as phobias, were their “stuff” and they needed to work on recognizing that and managing that.

Here is the other relevant section:

The pilot’s remarks confirmed the violation of the Contract of Carriage. He did not take the position that the passenger had not complied with crew member instructions. He instead pinned it on the bogus “making the crew uncomfortable” which in context seems to be about the mask and not about trying to position the crew as instructing him to remove his mask or that his pushback against their mask interrogation amounted to any sort of threat to them or disruptive behavior.

So it looks as if passengers who want to fly masked will both have to carry doctor’s notes attesting to their medical necessity, as well as copies of the carrier’s Contract of Carriage, so as to politely ask for the crew to point out exactly what you’ve done that warrants removal.

Of course, you could just boycott Lufthansa instead.

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¹

² Admittedly, airlines so abused their ability to overbook and then bump passengers to other flights that regulatory changes in the last few years have made it costly for an airline to rebook a confirmed passenger without his consent without also providing ample compensation.

Before you contend that arguing with crew against an unwarranted request/demand is a guaranteed loser, yours truly has not found that to be the case, although I have found the attendants on American (where I have had this happen) get extremely pushy (I have short and long form stories), while the ones on Delta have been more reasonable both in tone and substance. So the Lufthansa aggressiveness may be corporate character in action.