News and notes from around the interweb:
- How Spirit Airlines wound up putting that six year old unaccompanied minor on the wrong plane (HT: @crucker) The employee responsible has been fired.
Answers are finally coming in about how a 6-year-old flying on Spirit Airlines ended up lost at an airport hundreds of miles from where his family was waiting for him.
Casper’s family says they dropped him off with a Spirit Airlines team member in Philadelphia, where he was supposed to board a plane destined for Fort Myers.
However, Casper would later call his grandmother from Orlando, wondering why she wasn’t there.
- Heh.
air travel has gotten so bad
today the flight attendant kept waking me up because “sleep is for Delta Comfort+ Members,” then halfway through the flight they distributed weapons and the Delta Diamond Medallion passengers started hunting us for sport
— adam (@personofswag) December 26, 2023
- Austin is considering renaming its airport for LBJ, and the family of World War II hero Capt. John A. E. “Earl” Bergstrom for whom the airport is currently named is devastated. I have no particular attachment to Captain Bergstrom, but I’m not generally a fan of naming things for politicians, LBJ has plenty of things named for him already, and the change is costly with an unclear upside.
- A “fee fee”
We aren’t even pretending any more when it comes to bogus fees. pic.twitter.com/oI5tCS2REU
— Rakesh Agrawal (@rakeshlobster) December 28, 2023
- $15 Discovery Dollars per GHA Discovery booking through the app consumed by June 30
- Once again, if an airline gives you a free hotel room after cancelling your flight, you probably do not want it.
@AmericanAir you need to do better! You stranded 300 people at a hotel for the night with no luggage and all these people are waiting for their room. Your pilots and flight attendants just cut everyone who's been waiting in line for 30 mins. We're all tired and cranky! pic.twitter.com/aAlcgUSfLl
— Nick Balkevicius (@NBalkevicius) December 27, 2023
- American Airlines will take a $7.3 million annual federal subsidy to fly a 50 seat regional jet Philadelphia – Watertown, New York which is 61 miles from Syracuse. More subsidies for me, but not for thee.
.@AmericanAir wins the EAS contract for ART, with 12 round trips per week to PHL using ERJ-145 aircraft and will be compensated at an annual subsidy rate of $7,298,978. The contract runs for 2 years, starting 1 Feb 2024.#AvGeek
— Seth Miller (@WandrMe) December 28, 2023
American started flying 50 seat jets out of Watertown in 2017. Fewer than 60 people per day flew out of the airport last year. In winter Syracuse may be tough as an option, but I’m not sure why subsidize these flights and why do so in summertime? Moreover, why should these subsidies last forever? The Essential Air Service program was supposed to be a temporary transition measure as part of 1978 deregulation.
On the Unaccompanied minor issue. While it is totally the airline’s fault, I must ask, why didn’t the family member accompany the child to the gate to assure they got on the correct flight? The things that make you go hmmmm? I know you are paying Spirit for a service, but I still don’t trust them, as exampled here.
I really could care less what Austin’s airport is named. But yeah, it is a stupid idea to name it after LBJ or after anyone for that matter. When these buildings and airports carry these names in 200 years, no one will know who they were, or care.
Fees are getting so outrageous it is only a matter of time before they start charging a fee to pay for the administrative fee of charging fees. Yep!
If the airline gives you a room, take it. If the pilots and flight attendants get into their rooms before you, be glad at least THEY will be properly rested when you get on your flight in the morning. Your life depends on it. Did they stay at a Holiday inn?
EAS has not lived out it’s usefulness, though your example certainly is egregious. I would prefer to see a well-developed passenger rail system. It would serve more people than any airport. You have to drive to an airport that may be many miles away. But how far do most people live from rail tracks? yeah.
Spirit is charging $150 for their service to an unaccompanied minor. Like many things in the airline industry, they want to get the money but want to do the least they can for it. In this case, a family member was supposed to take the minor to the gate and wait the entire time until the airplane had taken off (just in case the airplane returned to the gate). This is what I would like to see on the videos. Was this done and the gate agent sneakily routed the minor to another airplane? Or did the family member get the minor to the wrong gate and then leave to save on parking fees?
Indeed the family member should have stayed with the unaccompanied child until the child boarded AND until the plane pushed back from the gate. If the family member had remained with the child, then the mistake should have been prevented. I hold the family as responsible as Spirit Airlines.
On the PHL-ART flight:
My husband grew up north of Syracuse. When I quoted him your rationale of “it’s only 61 miles from SYR”, he started to legit cackle with laughter.
In summer, it’s an easy drive. In winter – a.k.a. – Lake Effect Snow season? Not so much. Google “81 shut down north of syracuse snow” – when snow is falling at the rate of 3-4 inches per hour? They will shut down the roads.
There is a military base there – Fort Drum, which trains the 10th Mountain Division. Which is a specialized Light Infantry division used in rapid activations. So, in other words: DoD contractors do travel there, and can’t reliably get there by road in winter conditions. Hence a puddle-jumper directly into their regional airport.
Who puts an unaccompanied 6 year old on a plane?
@Chasmosaur – I expressly flagged the seasonal difference “In winter Syracuse may be tough as an option, but I’m not sure why subsidize these flights and why do so in summertime?”
Fort Drum = DoD related passengers. Whether it’s actual Army higher-ups or contractors. (You know rank-and-file use the fort’s air strip with more utilitarian planes. 😉 ) Hence government support for the regional airport.
It’s only for two years, so it might just be a trial run to see if it’s worth keeping. I seriously doubt anyone else would be flying into Watertown. Also, you just never know if there’s a specific contract in place right now that means having that flight makes it easier for staff to get in and out. Contracting can be weird like that.
PHL as the base is unusual, but it might have been chosen as a half-way point between NYC- and DC-based contractors. Easy enough to get to the airport from the train station or shuttles from the base airports.
@Chasmosaur – American has had a subsidy on the route for years, this is not new, they just won the next round of contracts
To be clear, Austin is not looking to rename the airport. The renaming idea was made up by the newspaper because they needed to sell papers.
@Ka Da – Mayor has had discussions with the LBJ foundation over renaming the airport after the former President
https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/austin-airport/austin-johnson-airport-mayor-in-talks-to-possibly-rename-aus-after-former-president/
Hey Hey LBJ how many kids have you killed today?
slogan for the airport
Even an unaccompanied minor has a boarding pass. And a seat assignment. So was nobody in the seat assigned which would make it obvious a mistake was in process? And did they not scan the boarding pass to discover it was the other flight the child should be going on? Something odd here, no?
@Michael E: I’ve boarded the wrong flight before. I had SDC’d to a middle exit row seat that was indeed empty on the incorrect flight. And a key part of the mix-up is that the alert for “You’re trying to board the wrong flight” is exactly the same as the alert for “Are you qualified to sit in an edit row?”… So when I was the last person to board and scanned my boarding pass, I just said “Yes” when it alerted, neither me nor the GA realizing the alert was for “wrong plane” not “exit row seat”.
I believe they try and seat minors at the rear of the plane so they’re easier to watch. And I’m guessing spirit flights may be less full more often? And I wouldn’t be surprised if there is an alert when you scan a UM boarding pass, and that alert is the same as the “Wrong Plane” alert, so if you’re expecting the alert, it’s easy for a human to assume they’re getting the alert they expect and fail to read the actual text of the alert. (When you have a process of here a human does the same thing 100+ times in a row, any human is susceptible to perceiving what they expect over what actually occurs, so the alerts looking and sounding the same is a system design failure.)
Thw boarding system really needs 2 separate alerts… One for “more action required” (like seat reassigned, upgrade, edit row seat), and one for “failure, do not board” (boarding pass not valid at all).
EAS should probably exist as a program, but the requirements need to be tightened up. Small airport a 4 hour drive from anywhere else? Sure.
My home base is EAU. United dropped the EAU-ORD flight which added value to the local economy, getting you to an airport where you could connect to anywhere. It’s been replaced by seasonal 2x/week service by Sun Country to places like Ft. Myers, where you can then connect to nowhere, and 3x/week service that puddle jumps the 75 minute drive to MSP where you can connect on Sun Country’s limited network. It’s a complete waste of taxpayer dollars.
They also operate a landline shuttle from the EAU airport terminal to MSP, which makes a lot more sense, although it competes with the existing shuttle service.
If the weather is bad enough that you can’t drive, you’re probably not flying either.
EAS really needs to update it’s requirements and require airports be at least 100-150 miles from other air service, and have flights that have some minimum number of connection options at the destination.