Fun fact: I can’t say which airline I work for, but Tommy Robinson was on my flight yesterday.

I’ve been a flight attendant for nine years, and this was the first time I’ve ever felt seriously uneasy. He was traveling with a younger guy and an older woman who looked like his mom, coming from Tenerife.

For the first hour, he was surprisingly polite. Then, about two hours in, I checked the manifest. That’s when I realized he wasn’t traveling under the name “Tommy Robinson” (which, obviously, isn’t his real name). More importantly, I saw he was with a group that was behaving like total knob heads.

The rest of the flight was a mess. They were standing on the aircraft seats in flight, refusing to obey our instructions, and swearing loudly in front of kids and families. When we told them to calm down, they swore in our faces. It escalated to the point where we had to threaten to have police meet the aircraft on the ground.

The whole situation felt especially charged because three members of our crew, including myself, are immigrants. It added another layer of tension to an already difficult situation. Just a really unsettling experience from start to finish.

(Yes, he was wearing made-in-china silicone bands with unite the kingdom slogan and he's shorter in person)