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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

#131

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

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.

The child remains on the aircraft after all other passengers have disembarked. She should then be taken by a member of staff to her connection.

At no time would another passenger be in a position to assist. The only people who could have helped were likely United's staff and the out-sourcing firm (who are also by extension United staff).

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

#132

Post by shrikant »

mgkimsal wrote: post #93
rmc wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. People only feel "screwed" by Ryanair because the are used to flexibility, and Ryanair are not flexible. "Oh I'm 2kg over, but that's not a lot, so they'll let me away with it.... What do you mean I have to pay €40?" "Oh they'd have to let me take my handbag, so I'll bring a massive one... what do you mean only one cabin bag?"

double agreed. however, it does bug me charging on weight for baggage when fat people pay the same price as extremely lightweight people. Someone who's 105 pounds with a 52 pound bag gets charged extra, while someone who's 290 pounds but has a 49 pound bag pays no extra charge. Dunno quite how they'd ever get around it, but it does bug me. And I say this as someone who's got a few extra pounds of his own :)

http://www.airfarewatchdog.com/blog/3801241/should-obese-pas...

Some airlines do have policies in place for such situations.

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

#133

Post by CWuestefeld »

pasbesoin wrote: post #64
fleitz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the article nails this on the head, management doesn't care about it's employees, and the employees pass this on to the customer. They care so little that they don't even want core pieces of their business done by their own people. It reminds me of a cable co in canada called Rogers, the entire thing is a bunch of outsourced services glued together with a couple sales people.

It can go further. Caring can be actively dis-incented. If your caring about a problem causes any disruption to your "normal" work, you will be penalized. That child you rescued and escorted to their destination or a safe location? That's 30 minutes you weren't "doing your job". And perhaps you're not authorized to escort children. The liability! Sorry, but we are going to have to terminate you. When it gets to this…

I don't know anything about this situation, but in some cases there can be other factors preventing people from doing the work, even if they want to. Liability, as you mention, is one such.

I recall many years ago, working at a certain phone company (I was a college student on a summer job). I needed to get some information off a circuit board that was sitting in a box on a warehouse shelf -- I could see it from where I was standing, but couldn't read it. Yet I was forced to stand around for 1/2 hour until a warehouse worker could go fetch the box for me. I was told that union rules didn't allow me to walk 50 feet over to pick up a box, and the union would file a grievance if I did so.

I don't mean this as a rant against unions. I just mean to say that there can be other extenuating factors. In the long run, management should be aware of these problems and act to mitigate them. But in the short term -- when there's a problem right now, that I'd like to fix -- both I and management may have our hands tied.

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

#134

Post by msrpotus »

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…

That's why there is crop insurance. Humans, last I checked, can't control the weather, so we create systems to make up for that risk.

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

#135

Post by ktizo »

Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #109
keithpeter wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ryanair makes it possible for a work colleague of my sister to commute from Cork to Liverpool (4 day work week, digs while in Liverpool). You get what it says on the packet.

My wife and I once flew the length of the UK return for under £4 on one of their sales deals. No typo there, under £4. And I used to commute Glasgow to London once a week and would regularly pay for for the train from the airport to the centre of town than for the flight.

And if you take the train from London to Glasgow, it is currently £120 for a single ticket, whereas I can book on British Airways for a flight tomorrow for £74.

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

#136

Post by wtvanhest »

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…

1st, $8b in theoretical subsidies after September 11th isn’t material when an industry has $100s of billions of debt and equity. Delta and United have about $65b alone. AIG’s bailout was $182B.

2nd, It is inexcusable for a human being to not help a young child regardless of the company they work for. However, the other stories about airlines being terrible with customer service are dumb. In general people are stressed out when they fly and they project it on staff. I see it every time I travel. People are mad about weather delays, mad about gate changes, mad, mad, mad. If I had to deal with that as an employee every day, I wouldn't be freindly either. What is the point?

3rd Most airline employees are making 30% less than they were in 2001. People’s retirements have been wiped out and they cannot change jobs in the industry because doing so would require they start at the lowest pay offered at a different company and wait until their seniority number allows them to climb. They work for zombie companies in which the employees have limited opportunity to help meaningfully change the business.

When I fly, I am nice to the staff and they are nice to me. I recognize the complexity of the daily achievement of getting people from place A to place B via air and I am extremely happy with today’s price point.

[added] Most people on HN hate the TSA, can you imagine having to deal with them every day on your way to work?

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

#137

Post by pcrh »

mseebach wrote: post #86
pcrh wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The returns a farmer receives depends also on the price the crop can receive. Barring futures contracts, for widely-traded crops such as wheat, soya and corn, this will depend on the global market, i.e. not only the local weather, but also the weather in Brazil, Australia, etc.

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

#138

Post by misiti3780 »

I'm not United's biggest fan, but this story sounds one-sided.

I know for a fact that flight attendants have procedures where a child is handed off from person-to-person, by signature. The agent comes with the child and paperwork, gives it to the FA, and then when the plane arrives at a new location, the paperwork and the child are handed off to the next person. This article does not mention any of the procedures, but I know they exist -- If a flight attendant loses a child, her job is on the line. The company does care.

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

#139

Post by imgabe »

lusr wrote: post #127
jhcoaps wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post is endemic of something I see a lot on HN. You know nothing about agriculture, but you see a minor set of stories and you think you're a fucking expert. You have no idea if the diversified strategy has a higher expected value, or if it's just a variance play based on heat, or if different weather conditions could've affected interplay in a different way. You have no idea what the crop insurances for differe…

Your post is endemic of something I see a lot of on the Internet. You hide behind an account you just made, aggressively, lengthily and rudely responding to somebody who actually desired to contribute to the discussion without contributing much of anything yourself, without seeing the irony in any of this.

Actually I found it to be a pretty compelling and well reasoned indictment of grandparent's utter failure to consider the many complex factors that can lead to the necessity of subsidizing certain industries.

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

#140

Post by ZoFreX »

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…

So what? Seriously, so what? If 10 people died from eating crisps (en-US: chips) a year, would you stop? There are endless edge-case examples I could pull out. You can't possibly know what the real odds are because it isn't news when someone /isn't/ asked to move his airline seat away from two children. The reason it isn't news is because it is by far the more common event!

So: Do you want to risk a 1 in a million chance of someone tsk tsking at you until you explain yourself to help a little lost girl? If your answer is "no" then I think that makes you kind of a bad person, just like those United employees.

You could look at it this way: The only way of increasing the perceived probability that an adult talking to a child is just being nice is to increase the number of times that exact event happens.

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