A Russian flight attendant was fired after a photo of her flipping off passengers was posted to her blog. Aeroflot gave Tatiana Kozlenko the boot, even though the claimed that it wasn't her hand giving the middle finger in the picture.
According to RT ,the photo of the hand of a flight attendant giving the middle finger to passengers on a jet appeared on Kozlenko's wall on Russian social network Vkontakte in October 2011. The photo was like dozens of times, but Aeroflot wasn't too happy with it. They became aware of the photo when renowned Russian blogger Ilya Varlamoc reposted the photo on Twitter and it was retweeted hundreds of times. As a result, Kozlenko was fired.
Aeroflot's decision received a lot of backlash from Russian twitter users. Many thought the photo was just an innocent joke. "Why do they blame someone for a photo posted on a personal page? This is common office humour. Is it prohibited to joke in Aeroflot?" wrote user @oleg_kozyrev, according to Russia Times.
Aeroflot responded to the backlash and stood by their decision to fire Kozlenko.
"The fact of posting a photo shows Tatiana's attitude towards passengers and her duties. She acknowledged her fault when she spoke to the leadership of the company,"Aeroflot's Twitter page read.
However Kozlenko claims this wasn't the case. She denies that it's her hand in the photo and she even points out that the plane wasn't an Aeroflot plane.
"I don't consider myself guilty! The photo was added to my page, I only tagged myself on it!!! The hand isn't mine, the plane is not my company's!!! I don't understand what they spoil my life for!!! I'm asking you for help and support!!!" Kozlenko wrote on her Vkontakte page.
This isn't the first time an Aeroflot flight attendant lost her job due to a web post. Flight attendant Ekaterina Solovyeva lost her job in May after she joked about the crash of a Sukhoi Superjet-100 in Indonesia.
In December, a Cathay Pacific flight attendant was fired after she said that she wanted to throw coffee in the face of a passenger in a Facebook post.
In 2008, 13 flight attendants were fired when Virgin Atlantic found that they were insulting passengers and discussing the airline's safety standards on Facebook
