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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

#141

Post by adolph »

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…

If my luggage didn't make a connection and I arrived at my final destination without it, I would think of it as "lost luggage." Would it matter to me if it was stuck in the connecting airport or sent elsewhere? No, it did not arrive with me, the airline lost it, even if temporarily. In lay person terms, the luggage is lost--the airline lost a child, yes.

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

#142

Post by mindcrime »

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…

If it happens to you it is a 100% result.

Just like it's a 100% result if your plane crashes. But we know that, statistically speaking, airline travel is safe and crashes are pretty rare.

So, of the million of interactions between men and unaccompanied children, how many result in some crazy, unjustified child-molester accusation? I'm guessing it's about the same as the percentage of flights that crash.

I don't believe that a handful of anecdotes, considered in isolation, are a good basis for making decisions.

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

#143

Post by rodolphoarruda »

"So some United executive called Annie and Perry at home yesterday to try to cool them out."

Interesting. I would make this guy wait some 40 mins on the phone, then tell him "something has happened" and that he would have to call later. In the meantime he would have to wait and watch the news getting widespread in media. A little bit of reciprocity would be nice to educate this corporate people. It's absurd that, IMHO, parents of a missing child who have not received proper care for days, now have to give all the attention and care to some executive.

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

#144

Post by axusgrad »

My first flight was unaccompanied at 10 years old, to Maine via Boston. All the airline's flights were delayed indefinitely due to some malfunction. A stewardess took my brother and I around Boston airport and kept an eye on us for 6 hours while things got straightened out. I've had respect for Delta ever since, even if all the people involved are long gone.

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

#145

Post by potatolicious »

drgath wrote: post #103
lunarscape wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

So, a handful of instances out of millions over the last 5 years. Got it.

Captain hyperbole to the rescue!

If you are a grown adult male in the USA, you will have experienced this. People believe these stories because it aligns with their own personal experiences.

So while few of us have actually been arrested for talking to a minor, and definitely very few have ever had to deal with the police over this, a large portion of us have felt the accusing stare for daring to interact with a child. We've felt the suspicious eyes of every single mother on us as we jog past a playground. We've seen our colleagues and acquaintances make paranoid, disparaging remarks about strangers around their children.

We're not scared of children because of a few scary stories in a few newspapers - we're scared of children because this happens incredibly often and the scary news stories demonstrate just how far these situations can escalate out of control.

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

#146

Post by potatolicious »

scrumper wrote: post #88
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 th…

This is yet another case of modern parental paranoia. Your child's greatest risk factor comes from people already known to you - statistically Uncle Bob is many times more dangerous than a random stranger.

As a society we have a tendency to focus our attention away from where the data leads us. We will act extremely suboptimally to prevent an incredibly remote risk, while ignoring much more likely ones altogether.

If the goal is to prevent child predators, we would do a whole lot better by starting with the people already in our immediate lives, rather than worry about a stranger on a bus.

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

#148

Post by robk »

ljf wrote: post #72
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've only been to the US once, and I really wasn't sure how I would find the 'service industries' (waiting, bar staff, shop staff) always asking if I 'had a nice day' etc. I thought I would find it cloying and draining. In reality I generally felt VERY well taken care of by everyone I met in retail or service industries - EXCEPT for the airlines. We flew BA, London to LAX, and as ever BA were fine. We then flew Delta…

BA is just as bad as any other US-based carrier. Surly staff are everywhere.

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

#149

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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.

>I don't think weather forecasting is currently good enough for //

That would be an interesting study. Take weather data and forecast data from the last n years and look at how good various sources are at prediction over various regions and timescales.

I'm sure it's been done?

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

#150

Post by pavel_lishin »

fleitz wrote: post #49
masklinn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Wow. Overprotective much? At 10 I went to school by bus, alone, with 2 or 3 changes along the way (and a ~10 minutes walk between home and the bus station), total travel time was maybe 45~60mn and same thing the other way around in the evening. And I had friends boarding who took the train at the beginn…

I'll second this, in North America everything that is possible to make a child absolutely dependant is done. Parents who try to raise functioning adults are shunned. There was a national outcry because someone let their 12 year old ride a subway. You can find most of the roots of helicopter parenting in attachment parenting, the idea that a child should always be touched by their parent until they're about 5.

I grew up in Moscow, before I turned ten I would regularly take the subway all the way to school and back. I find it ludicrous and offensive that some of my peers weren't allowed to walk or bike ten blocks to school in a suburban neighborhood.
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