BBC weather presenter Georgie Palmer deboarded from flight for asking co-passengers not to eat peanuts

A BBC weather presenter, her husband and their two daughters were asked to deboard from a Turkey-bound plane after she told her fellow passengers not to eat peanuts because one of her daughters was allergic to peanuts. The incident occurred on May 21 as the family was travelling from London Gatwick Airport to Dalaman in Turkey.

According to Georgie Palmer, she informed the crew about her younger 12-year-old daughter Rosie’s “anaphylactic allergy to peanuts” to the crew onboard the SunExpress flight, the Daily Mail reported.

But when the crew refused to make an announcement to ask the passengers not to consume peanuts, saying that their allergies’ policy had been “updated”, Palmer took it upon herself to inform her fellow travellers about the issue.

She said she spoke to the passengers and they “happily agreed to pass on the message”.

However, the captain was enraged and asked the family to deboard before the flight took off.

“How we were treated was disgusting. The captain decided, because of my daughter’s allergy he didn’t want to fly with her on board. When he found out I had spoken to the other passengers, he was screaming at me from the cockpit. He was so angry, the next thing I knew we were told to get off the plane,” the Daily Mail quoted Palmer as saying.

“It is really beautiful how every passenger on that plane was so wonderful, but nobody working on that plane showed one ounce of compassion. We have spent the last 12 years trying to teach people about allergies and to use epi-pens. It’s a volatile allergen and even if Rosie didn’t come into direct contact with a peanut, if somebody was eating one onboard she would die,” she added.

In an Instagram post, Palmer said that what SunExpress “clearly lack is the understanding that we are savvy”.

“There’s no beef with simple asks like these. People get it! The hand holding, tears and emotion from the passengers as we were hoofed off the plane after the angry little captain shouted at us from the cockpit.”

In its response to the Instagram post, the airline said the “well-being of our passengers is very important to us and we’d like to check the details of this matter with utmost importance and diligence”.

Following the episode, the family took an EasyJet flight to Turkey, and according to the BBC presenter, the “crew happily made several announcements asking passengers not to open packets of peanuts onboard”.

This is however, not the first time that a passenger has been deboarded due to peanut allergy.

In 2023, a passenger and her family was removed from a British Airways flight because her son had a severe nut allergy and there was a meal with nuts.