Canadian singer Sarah Blackwood kicked off United flight over crying son

The parents are embarrassed. The people in nearby seats are first sympathetic, then annoyed. And the baby himself is demonstrably upset. But what are you going to do? If you're on a plane, babies are going to cry.

Not on a United Airlines flight, though. Yesterday, singer Sarah Blackwood of the Canadian band Walk Off the Earth, was kicked off a flight from San Francisco to Vancouver when her 23-month-old son, Giorgio, wouldn't stop crying. Blackwood is pregnant.

"[The flight attendants] only came up to me two or three times and said, 'Control your child,'" Blackwood tells As It Happens host Carol Off. "Like, he's not an animal. He's just crying really loud. I was holding him on my lap and he was crying."

She says that while the plane was taxiing down the runway, her son fell asleep. However, the plane didn't take off and turned back. Blackwood and her son were then asked to exit the plane.

"When I got up to get off the plane, other passengers were infuriated," she says. "They were standing up saying, you can't ask her to leave the plane, her baby's now sleeping, everything's fine, he was just crying, she was just doing her best. It was just a really unbelievable situation."

SkyWest Airlines, which operated the United flight 6223, issued a statement saying the crew made the appropriate decision to return to the gate in the interest of safety.

Despite numerous requests, the child was not seated, as required by federal regulation to ensure passenger safety, and was repeatedly in the aisle of the aircraft before departure and during taxi... While our crews work to make travelling safe and comfortable for all travellers, particularly families, the crew made the appropriate decision to return to the gate in the interest of safety.- SkyWest Airlines statement

"I think that's an exaggeration so that they had a reason to justify turning an entire plane around and making hundreds of people's travel day much worse than it already was," she responds.

"We were seated, we were in a window seat. I think they also mention that at one point he was running down the aisles, which is not true at all. First of all, my son is really shy, he doesn't do things like run around aisles and we were in a window seat. There was a gentleman beside me in the aisle seat, there's no way he could've been in the aisle."

Blackwood and her child and nanny were escorted off the plane. The flight was also further delayed by more than an hour while the cargo crew removed their luggage from the airplane.

Upon her exit, she took to social media to spread word of her experience.

"I would love an apology," she says. "I want to be a voice for people who have had this happen to them and [have] not been able to do anything about it. I'm sure that there's plenty of mothers out that have had horrible travel experiences and they just deal with it."