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United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

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Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#81

Post by icebraining »

sliverstorm wrote: post #55
k-mcgrady wrote: post #36

United is clearly very wrong here and treating their customers poorly. But, and I'm sure this is going to be an unpopular opinion, who sends a 10 year old across the country on a plane alone? I wouldn't send a 10 year on a 30min bus ride alone. I understand United offers a service to make this possible but it seems like a ridiculous thing for a parent to take advantage of. Maybe it's a cultural difference and this is…

So long as your kid can handle him/herself for a few hours, what's the big deal? I believe parents are allowed to go through security to meet their kid at the gate, so really all the kid has to do is board, entertain him/herself, and deboard. As to why, specifically? Well, suppose you split custody of a kid with your ex-spouse, and you live in L.A. while ex-spouse lives in New York. Or, suppose your parents want your…

all the kid has to do is board, entertain him/herself, and deboard.

No, at least not in this story. She had to make a transfer in Chicago.

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#82

Post by objclxt »

waveman2 wrote: post #78
ZoFreX wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuck. That. If you're not willing to take the negligible* risk of the situation being misconstrued to help a lost scared child, you are no better than the United Airlines employees. * Yes, it is negligible. For every scare story you hear, thousands of people interact with minors with absolutely no issues at all.

If it happens to you it is a 100% result. Just today a man was ordered to move his airline seat away from two young children. Until he proved they were his children. In another story out today a woman aggressively approached a man and threatened him with arrest for taking his own children to a store. Another man found a lost child and returned the child to its mother, only to be abused and threatened by the mother. Y…

Sorry, are you claiming these as factual stories, or are you just citing anecdotes?

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#83

Post by mseebach »

gnaffle wrote: post #79
chimi wrote: post #33

This is a problem bigger than United -- which has a lot of problems. This is what you get when you subsidize bad companies that need to fail. United needs to fail so someone better can take over. The moral hazards are ruining the country. I saw it recently with farmers struggling from the drought. Compare this farmer: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7417774n who has acres full of hay that don't do well in the…

Ryanair isn't subsidized. It's a bad airline that doesn't need to fail because it makes money. It's one of the airlines in Europe with the worst customer service track record. The same is true for lots of other compenies with terrible customer service. On the other hand, there are many state-owned or subsidized airlines that have very good customer service. So whether or not United needs to fail, I think the problem…

Ryanair isn't a bad airline. It's a fairly good airline in terms of moving passengers around. They are completely honest, even proud, to offer literally no customer service and comfort.

Look at the comments here: http://www.airlinequality.com/Forum/ryan.htm

Not one is about Ryanair failing to deliver the service they've sold (as the article is very much about United failing to) - they're all about people being disappointed about a £25 flight on an airline that prides itself on not caring one bit about your comfort ... not caring about their comfort. All of the extra charges complained about are loudly and clearly announced as part of the ticket buying process. Don't bring a 20 kg bag on a flight when your ticket clearly says "max 15 kg, excess charges apply", then complain about excess charges being leveraged.

If you want service, comfort and flexibility, fly BA and pay for it (or EasyJet, they're usually very good IMO, and usually priced in the sweet spot between Ryanair and "proper" airlines). If you want to get to the beach in the cheapest possible way, everything else be damned, fly Ryanair.

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#84

Post by narcissus »

mherdeg wrote: post #80

I don't think this blog post's headline is quite right. "Losing a child" is putting a child on BOS-EWR instead of BOS-CLE and not noticing the problem until the child's family in Cleveland calls the parents and the parents call Newark, http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2009... . It sounds like what happened here was "causing a child to miss a connection" (and also separately "delaying the delive…

This may sound like a stupid question, but what does 'pax' mean? I presume it's something like 'traveler' or 'client' or something similar, but was really curious what it was short for / meant.

As for the rest of your post, it was really interesting: I had no idea that there was so much involved in handling a UM (an acronym I learned about 5 minutes ago :) ).

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#85

Post by cmiles74 »

arjn wrote: post #30
jcampbell1 wrote: post #25

I want to know who the the passengers were sitting next to this child were that didn't help her with her transfer. The lack of human decency is a cultural problem as much as an airline problem. What the fuck is wrong with people that don't talk to a child traveling alone and make sure she makes her connection. I blame humanity as much as the airline.

It sucks to say this but in the US if you're male, the smart/safe thing to do is not have any contact with an unaccompanied child at all. There is a non-trivial chance that may be misconstrued as something else and you could find yourself in a whole world of trouble. Of course this should not stop someone from bringing a distressed child to the attention of the flight crew and other passengers.

If no one cares enough to point this child at the correct gate, I'd be surprised to find someone who cares enough to file a report with the police or to hail down security. We're not talking about putting this kid in a car, we're talking about a little guidance in an airport.

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#86

Post by mseebach »

pcrh wrote: post #69
chimi wrote: post #33

This is a problem bigger than United -- which has a lot of problems. This is what you get when you subsidize bad companies that need to fail. United needs to fail so someone better can take over. The moral hazards are ruining the country. I saw it recently with farmers struggling from the drought. Compare this farmer: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7417774n who has acres full of hay that don't do well in the…

I don't think weather forecasting is currently good enough for a farmer to plan which crops to plant based on rainfall predictions. If every farmer planted a diversity of crops to account for all likely weather scenarios, then the average productivity would drop, as most crops would turn out to be unsuitable for the weather that occurred.

It depends - surely, studying the weather (how much snow there is on the mountains in winter affects how much water there is in the rivers in the spring) can reduce, if not remove, the risk of crop failure. Perhaps you have the choice of a more expensive drought-resistant crop and a cheaper one that isn't.

Breaking the feedback loop by subsidizing failed crops doesn't create any incentive to invest effort into making good decisions in these areas.

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#87

Post by [deleted] »

waveman2 wrote: post #78
ZoFreX wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuck. That. If you're not willing to take the negligible* risk of the situation being misconstrued to help a lost scared child, you are no better than the United Airlines employees. * Yes, it is negligible. For every scare story you hear, thousands of people interact with minors with absolutely no issues at all.

If it happens to you it is a 100% result. Just today a man was ordered to move his airline seat away from two young children. Until he proved they were his children. In another story out today a woman aggressively approached a man and threatened him with arrest for taking his own children to a store. Another man found a lost child and returned the child to its mother, only to be abused and threatened by the mother. Y…

[deleted]

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#88

Post by scrumper »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #36

United is clearly very wrong here and treating their customers poorly. But, and I'm sure this is going to be an unpopular opinion, who sends a 10 year old across the country on a plane alone? I wouldn't send a 10 year on a 30min bus ride alone. I understand United offers a service to make this possible but it seems like a ridiculous thing for a parent to take advantage of. Maybe it's a cultural difference and this is…

- I wouldn't send a 10 year old on a 30min bus ride alone

That attitude is rather a shame, I think. How are we expected to raise a generation of functioning, independent adults if the default expectation is that kids are constantly chaperoned? The societal dangers are familiar to anyone who's tried to deal with the average intern.

Unaccompanied minors on US airlines are very common. The service works well, most of the time, but when it fails the result is always a lost, scared child and some very angry parents. Headlines inevitably follow. In this case, United's callous treatment is utterly deplorable. Please understand that it's the airline that's at fault here, not the parents for availing themselves of a tried and tested service.

Children are humans, therefore highly adaptable and a lot smarter than anyone thinks. Lone children as young as six are frequently put in charge of an entire family's herd of goats in Kenya; now, granted, there aren't the same dangers from traffic or population density that you'd find in a city, but the herd represents the majority of the family's wealth and it's therefore an awesome responsibility. Imagine herding your parent's entire net worth at that age! Kids that young take the bus - the regular commuter service - to school alone in the UK all the time. I see young kids in NYC taking the subway alone every day. Very, very rarely is there a problem; certainly no more so than a mother doing the school run rolling her SUV.

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#89

Post by lunarscape »

objclxt wrote: post #82
waveman2 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it happens to you it is a 100% result. Just today a man was ordered to move his airline seat away from two young children. Until he proved they were his children. In another story out today a woman aggressively approached a man and threatened him with arrest for taking his own children to a store. Another man found a lost child and returned the child to its mother, only to be abused and threatened by the mother. Y…

Sorry, are you claiming these as factual stories, or are you just citing anecdotes?

Unfortuately I'm pretty sure they're all real reported stories. In one case the man asked to move away from his own children was Boris Johnson, the mayor of London[1], when he was an MP in 2006.

Edit: There's more on wikipedia [2].

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3634055/Com...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_sex_discrimination_pol...

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#90

Post by fjarlq »

arjn wrote: post #30
jcampbell1 wrote: post #25

I want to know who the the passengers were sitting next to this child were that didn't help her with her transfer. The lack of human decency is a cultural problem as much as an airline problem. What the fuck is wrong with people that don't talk to a child traveling alone and make sure she makes her connection. I blame humanity as much as the airline.

It sucks to say this but in the US if you're male, the smart/safe thing to do is not have any contact with an unaccompanied child at all. There is a non-trivial chance that may be misconstrued as something else and you could find yourself in a whole world of trouble. Of course this should not stop someone from bringing a distressed child to the attention of the flight crew and other passengers.

Do you have evidence to support this claim?
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