Students thrown off flight

NEW YORK (AP):A group of about 100 high school students travelling from New York to Atlanta were thrown off a flight, along with their chaperones, after the pilot and crew lost patience with some kids who wouldn't sit down and put away their cell phones.

The teenagers, all seniors at the Yeshiva of Flatbush in Brooklyn, were ordered off the AirTran flight around 6 a.m. on Monday as it sat at a gate at LaGuardia Airport.

AirTran's parent company, Southwest Airlines, said in a statement that flight attendants asked passengers several times to take their seats and put their mobile devices away. The airline said that when some didn't comply, the captain repeated the request. When that didn't work either, the whole group of students was ordered to disembark for safety reasons, the airline said.

The flight was delayed for about 45 minutes while the students filed out of the Boeing 737, which seats about 137 people, leaving the plane mostly empty.

Rabbi Seth Linfield, executive director at Yeshiva of Flatbush, said that administrators were still looking into the matter yesterday but that he believed the adults on the trip who said the students weren't behaving that badly.