Captain Cans Coughing Teen From 10-Hour Flight

March 28, 2007— -- You may want to bring a doctor's note next time you plan to fly somewhere but are feeling a bit under the weather.

A Continental Airlines pilot ordered a 16-year-old girl off a plane in New York Tuesday for coughing too much, a decision that infuriated parents eagerly awaiting her return thousands of miles away.

Rachel Collier's mother was waiting for her daughter to return home to Honolulu after a class trip to Washington, D.C., and New York when she got a call from one of the trip supervisors telling her that Rachel wouldn't be coming home just yet.

"She explained what was happening, and I thought it was an April Fool's joke because I couldn't imagine that happening," said Stephanie Collier, Rachel's mom.

But the airline wasn't kidding around and a spokesman Wednesday stuck by the captain's preogative to remove the girl, calling that authority the industry standard.

Rachel boarded the nonstop flight to Hawaii with 40 classmates and two teachers she was traveling with. Moments after Collier was seated, she began to cough uncontrollably -- suffering from a cold she caught from some of her friends earlier in the week.

After a few minutes, members of the flight staff asked the teen if she was OK.

"The flight crew was giving her the option of whether she wanted to stay or not," said Collier. "A doctor onboard even did a brief physical, said she sounded clear, to give her some NyQuil and she'd be fine, but the pilot didn't want to listen to that."

Instead, according to Collier, he stepped in and asked that she be taken off the flight.

"I can confirm that there was a passenger who was asked to deplane because she was very ill," said Julie King, a Continental Airlines spokeswoman. "As a precautionary measure for the passengers around her, she was asked to get off [the plane]."

A plane's captain has long had the authority to scrutinize a situation on the aircraft, even before Sept. 11, according to King.

"It's the sole discretion of the pilot to remove anyone from the flight," King said.

The airline echoed King in a statement released Wednesday.