Blind man kicked off flight due to restless guide dog; flight cancelled when passengers speak up for him

A legally blind man was removed from a Philadelphia flight when his guide dog became restless and the other passengers weren’t going to stand for it.

Albert Rizzi was on a US airways flight that was to depart from Philadelphia to New York on Wednesday with his guide dog Doxy lying at his feet. A flight attendant reportedly told Rizzi that Doxy needed to lie under the seat in front of him because of safety reasons and offered to help get the dog settled so the flight could depart.

Doxy, a golden lab, soon became restless because they had already been waiting on the airport tarmac for over an hour. When it became a problem for flight attendants, the fellow passenger who was sitting next to Rizzi offered to give up her seat so Doxy could have more room to lay, reports the New York Daily News.

Rizzi tried to get his dog settled so they could leave, but the flight attendant went to the pilot with the problem, and soon it was announced that the plane would be returning to the gate. When they arrived, Rizzi and Doxy were both taken off of the plane.

"The lady comes back and gets very insistent, and I said, 'Look, I don't understand what you want me to do.' I said, 'He's as best as he can, he's where he needs to be,'" Rizzi told WABC-TV. "And I hear nobody else moving, and as I'm walking to the front, I'm like wait a second, why am I the only one getting off?"

It was then that the other passengers on the plane raised their voices and tried to stand up for Rizzi. They told the flight attendants that the fault was not Rizzi’s, but the flight attendant’s, who was not willing to compromise so they could take off.

“We were all kind of raised our voices and said this is a real problem,” one passenger told WABC. “So the captain winds up coming out of the cockpit, and he basically asked us all to leave the aircraft."

The flight was cancelled and some passengers took a bus to New York while others made other travel plans.

U.S. Airways reportedly said that Rizzi was verbally abusive towards the flight attendant, but they are currently investigating the situation.