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

http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/08/united-airlines-lost-my-friends-10-year-old-daughter-and-didnt-care.html

by Brajeshwar • 14 years ago

242 188 14 years ago

bobsutton.typepad.com

Foy• 14 years ago

This is the kind of rage-inducing stuff that makes you want to choke a flight attendant.

I cannot even imagine what it would feel like to be told over the phone that the company lost your child, and the baggage, and that they don't really care... or even think it's a big deal.

snprbob86• 14 years ago

As someone who is dating a flight attendant, may I say: Please don't choke a flight attendant. They are absolutely the least culpable people involved with airline incompetence.

At least for Delta, flight attendants' primary compensation is based on scheduled flight time. Not actual flight time. Not tarmac time. Not delay time. Scheduled flight time. And even then, only with passengers!

So when you're stuck at the gate, waiting for some nincompoop to fetch the jet bridge, and you start giving the flight attendants hell, you need to understand that waiting there sucks for them too. They have only a few short hours to get a half night's sleep and enjoy the destination; the only perk that justifies their lifestyle. The rest of their job boils down to glorified waitress and underpaid babysitter.

If you think you've got a travel horror story, you ain't got nothing on a flight attendant. One night, my girlfriend's phone woke us up at 3 AM. She was on call and was needed immediately for a flight from Anchorage (we're in Seattle). It's about 40 minutes to the airport and this was a "short call", meaning she needed to be there in less than 2 hours! She and 5 of her co-workers, had to jump out of bed and haul ass to the airport where they boarded an empty flight to Anchorage. They were there to relieve a crew that didn't receive the legal minimum rest time due to a weather delay. While they were in the air, scheduling decided "fuck the FAA regulations" and put the overworked crew back on a plane anyway. So my girlfriend's crew arrives, finds that the flight they were supposed to work has already departed, and the pilot who brought them required a legal rest period. So they were required to spend the night in Alaska and take another empty flight home. It was the dead of winter, so it was far too cold to go anywhere outside the hotel. All in all, the crew received one days worth of per diem and no compensation for either flight, as they were "dead heading", which is unpaid. That per diem is fixed for "domestic" travel, so it's relative value varies by destination. It generally doesn't even cover the cost of meals in Alaska.

Fuck airlines.

flyinRyan• 14 years ago

>As someone who is dating a flight attendant, may I say: Please don't choke a flight attendant.

Everyone is responsible for their own actions. It doesn't matter if those are your "orders", you're still completely responsible if you carry them out.

FrankBooth• 14 years ago

The responsibility lies with the parents. What are they doing sending a child so young alone? United is not a baby-sitting service.

colmvp3• 14 years ago

Why didn't the parents give the kid a cellphone? There's no way I'd just leave my kid to travel alone on a flight, let alone without a cell phone.

hoi• 14 years ago

Still doesn't address the key issue which was noone at United cared enough or had the initiative to deal with the problem of a missing child / missed flight situation and left the children unattended.

slowpoke2• 14 years ago

How on earth did people travel some ten or twenty years ago I wonder? You know, before cellphones were widespread or even affordable? For fuck's sake, children aren't dumb. Always treating them as if they are results in them not growing into independent adults.

Besides, unaccompanied flights are awesome as a child. I did that once, don't remember how old I was. Flew with the German Lufthansa from my parents to my grandparents. You can't imagine how adult I felt, flying (almost) all alone. I remember the attendants were all friendly and helpful, and the gentleman next to me even swapped his seat with me so I could look out of the window. It was a valuable and memorable experience.

dubfan• 14 years ago

The child was going to camp. Is it reasonable to expect the parents to spend the money and time to fly to and from the destination? When I was eight years old I flew unaccompanied between Butte, MT and Los Angeles. It involved two different airlines (including United) and stops in Spokane, Portland and San Francisco. I got there and back without a hitch. My parents couldn't afford the extra tickets or the time off from work. Airlines have been dealing with unaccompanied minors for a long time. It's really not hard.

Zarathust• 14 years ago

United has a service where someone acts as a baby-sitter for the child. The story is about how that service failed and how United Airlines recovered from that failure.

tylermenezes2• 14 years ago

"recovered" heh

chris_wot• 14 years ago

There are such things as services to ensure that unattended children are looked after. United have a duty of care towards the child. Let me put it this way - if a school "lost" a child, they'd be damned sure to raise a ruckus when they found out. United offers a service to ensure unaccompanied minors get to their destination, and they damned well better make sure it works 100% of the time. And if it doesn't, they'd better have smoothly operating contingency plans to fix the matter.

MartinCron• 14 years ago

They actually are, or they pretend to be. They charge a $99 unaccompanied minor fee.

fingerprinter2• 14 years ago

Are you fucking joking? Yes, perhaps the parents shouldn't have sent the kid, should have gotten a cell phone etc. But there is ZERO excuse for what happened to that child at the hands of United, in a service they provide and charge for. This isn't a black and white issue, though using percentages, fault is 85+% United, 15-% parents.

masklinn4• 14 years ago

> This isn't a black and white issue

How's it not? As you noted United charge for an unaccompanied minor service[0], the parents believed everything was squared and United completely dropped the ball. Had the service not existed they could have opted to not send the child to camp, try to get what to do drilled into her and sent her on her own or found somebody to accompany. Then they could have been at fault if things had gone wrong.

But here? I fail to see how any fault can be put on the parents. We can debate between the fault being 100% United or 80% United and 20% bad luck, but the parents? Not in the presentation of the article.

[0] And the complaint letter adds details:

> The United personnel who gave her the wristband and instructions told her very loud and clear to “only go with someone with a United badge on and that she would be accompanied at all times”.

masklinn4• 14 years ago

> United is not a baby-sitting service.

They are, the parents very specifically opted into (and paid for) United's $99 "baby-sitting" (unaccompanied minor) service. Let me quote from the parents's letter:

> The United personnel who gave her the wristband and instructions told her very loud and clear to “only go with someone with a United badge on and that she would be accompanied at all times”.

I don't think this even needs additional emphasizing, it stands on its own.

andy_herbert• 14 years ago

Not really surprising, in my opinion once these organizations become large enough that diffusion of responsibility become institutionalized. It doesn't necessarily indicate that the individuals don't care, just that they feel that it isn't their responsibility to do so.

colmvp3• 14 years ago

I flew on U.S. Airways a few weeks back. Lining up to board the plane, a passenger noticed someone left a purse at the gate. A passenger said to the U.S. Airways attendent, "Do you think it makes sense to announce to the gate and the plane that someone left a purse? Maybe someone will come and pick it up." The attendent shrugged his shoulders and kind of said, "meh, not my problem."

cellis• 14 years ago

O'Hare is gigantic airport. And, I know from experience that some flights from O'hare to GRR are running tight,sometimes as little as 10 minutes before the connecting flight taxis. I once sprinted through O'Hare to catch a connecting flight to GR. So I'm not surprised at all by this.

Dylan16807• 14 years ago

That's a valid excuse for missing the connection. Not so much for anything else.

greggman• 14 years ago

Doesn't this sound like many large internet companies? Paypal? Ebay? Google? Facebook? Yahoo? All of them seem to ignore their customers. At least that's my experience. They only seem to solve issues when either you have connections to someone on the inside or manage to get your story carried/notice on some major news website (HN included).

tylermenezes2• 14 years ago

At least losing my Facebook profile (or even my money) isn't nearly as bad as losing a child!

shardling• 14 years ago

No, the two experiences are nothing alike. Those companies make it impossible to contact a human being in the first place.

This article very specifically touches upon how the United employees were asked directly by a scared child for help, and yet did nothing. There are a lot of other associated failures, but this is the central idea: that the individuals working for the company felt not even a little responsibility to help their customers.

Google, the company, ignores you as a matter of policy. That might be a dubious practice, but it is categorically different.

swang• 14 years ago

I'm being as polite as I can say this, but how is it that when you read this article you think it is yet another, "company ignore customer story?" I think most people read this and are appalled by the fact that United is so far over on the wrong side of the line that they can't even be bothered to worry about a human being anymore. They are so far gone that no one in the system cared that a kid is alone by him/herself. Imagine the shitstorm that would have happened had something happened to the kid.

But to answer your question, no. Paypal, eBay, Google, Facebook, Yahoo. None of these companies are in the business of transporting humans (at least not yet, and I guess yes only if you count those self-driving cars Google has).

gabrielf• 14 years ago

They aren't in the business of transporting human beings, but they are in the business of transporting and storing things that are really, really important to human beings. Their financial information. Their family photos, records of who they talked to and what they said, etc. Real human beings got hurt when Yahoo handed over information about who they were talking to to the Chinese government. If you spend 99 cents on an MP3 from Amazon and something goes wrong you'll almost certainly get a really good customer service experience. There's no reason that a company you're trusting with all of your communications can't have the same level of service.

lancefisher• 14 years ago

Wow. This is one thousand times worse than breaking guitars. I would love to see that band make another video about this incident. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

benologist• 14 years ago

United are losing it at the moment. I had 2 flights the other week where they couldn't even get someone to move the walkway thingy in line with the plane so we all just stood around waiting after we landed. On one flight the pilot actually phoned because he couldn't get anyone on the radio.

They're really hit and miss with the service - it's either great or it's shit. Sometimes I really love them... I've had two flights where a host has gone out of their way to block off a faulty overhead light and a faulty in seat entertainment system so I could sleep, another flight where I didn't have a long enough layover to get food and they had no snack service so they gave me two main courses (and I wasn't even elite back then). Other times they're like a bad fucking movie - 6 weeks ago at 1am after a cancelled flight they just arbitrarily closed the elite line with "a dozen people left" and told us to go to the end of the economy line with 100s of people waiting in it already for reticketing and hotel vouchers.

cjrp2• 14 years ago

Services like operating the walkway and the tugs that push-back the plane from the gate are often outsourced. Perhaps that's the connection... in most of the cases where the people did a terrible job, it's because the role's been outsourced.

fleitz3• 14 years ago

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.

beagle32• 14 years ago

My experience is that it's very simple:

- What was previously Continental, works well.

- What was previously United, doesn't.

I'm sure the Continental parts will converge to mediocrity given enough time - but for now, they're still closer to Continental quality than to old-United quality.

ycomboman• 14 years ago

The reason Continental part works is because CO systems were chosen as a part of merger and UA agents are not well trained in the mainframe commands. Airlines still use Mainframe systems with green screens for agent use

muro• 14 years ago

scary story.

Reminded me of this kid's story (almost same age):

http://overheadbin.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/07/25/12945121-rom...

jcampbell1• 14 years ago

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.

arjn2• 14 years ago

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.

gitarr2• 14 years ago

This is a very interesting phenomenon.

1) A child approached by an adult man = everyone is alerted.

2) A helpless child that should be helped = nobody cares.

It seems that in case 1 it's more about getting the bad guy then to help the child. This is all sorts of crazy if there is any truth to it. I'd love to see a study on this.

ZoFreX2• 14 years ago

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.

cmiles74• 14 years ago

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.

fjarlq• 14 years ago

Do you have evidence to support this claim?

endgame• 14 years ago

Well, if you're male, you won't be sitting next to any unaccompanied children, much less helping them:

- http://www.theage.com.au/travel/travel-incidents/seat-swap-o...

- http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-incidents/nurse-humiliat...

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

If that's standard policy in the airline industry, then half of the adult population wouldn't be able to help the poor child even if they wanted to.

corin_3• 14 years ago

That's... wow. I mean, even overlooking the obvious flaws in this logic, even if it is a paedophile sat next to the kids, what are they going to do in the middle of a flight surrounded by other people?

waveman22• 14 years ago

And if you did, you would be likely to find yourself in cuffs.

As an investor I looked into United and I believe the issue was that, being staff owned for a long time, there was no effective management and poor performers could not be fired. As a result a culture of not-my-problem arose. Cultures, once established, are hard to shift.

I remember coming in to the US on a 16 hour flight, I was having trouble getting my bag out of the overhead compartment and was treated to an extended harangue by a fat, ugly, unpleasant woman (stewardess) about how stupid all men were. All I needed not to hear after a long trip (with another 8 hours to travel to look forward to). This was in business class. Last time I traveled with United.

rblackwater2• 14 years ago

Nobody is responsible for other people's children. Not making sure an unaccompanied minor gets to her next flight is not "lack of human decency".

masklinn4• 14 years ago

> Nobody is responsible for other people's children.

He didn't say anybody (other than United) was responsible.

> Not making sure an unaccompanied minor gets to her next flight is not "lack of human decency".

I'd say not helping a fellow human in distress, especially a vulnerable one (such as a child) in a situation where you can help at next to no cost, definitely qualifies for "lack of human decency".

nandemo• 14 years ago

The passengers have nothing to do with it. If a kid is seating next to me in an airplane, I won't engage in conversation with her. How would I even know whether she's accompanied or not? A normal assumption would be that her parents were sitting elsewhere, maybe with another kid.

mattheww• 14 years ago

In flights I've been on with obvious unaccompanied children, someone from the flight crew tells the child to stay in his/her seat until everyone else has gotten off the aircraft.

UnoriginalGuy• 14 years ago

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).

anusinha• 14 years ago

As someone who traveled many times as an unaccompanied minor (without a cellphone) in the early 2000s under United Airlines, American Airlines, and Northwest Airlines, I'm shocked to hear this story. I always felt safe and knew who was in charge of taking me from place to place. I'm astonished that United's service has deteriorated to this extent. Yes, it was only a very small sample size of United's service staff, but the fact that this situation happened does not bode well for the quality of their service and will hopefully spark something in the administration and leadership to revitalize the culture that currently tolerates such treatment. If not, well, there are plenty of cheaper airlines with superior service and United's marketshare and reputation will suffer. There's always someone willing to provide the service you do for less. You have to figure out what you can do better than the other guys and capitalize on it.

colmvp3• 14 years ago

My experience with United/U.S. Airways/American has been, shit to say the least. I'm astounded by how generally large North American carriers pale compared to either small companies like Westjet and Porter, or large Asian airlines like Singapore and Emirates.

chimi• 14 years ago

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 drought to this farmer who planted a solid base of drought tolerant sorghum http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7417664n in addition to his corn. The second farmer is diversified. He's making smarter decisions with his farm, but because he wasn't hit as hard as other farmers who aren't making good decisions with their land, he's not going to get as much compensation for failed crops. That first farmer needs to go to work for the second farmer so he can learn better and more profitable methods of farming and we will all benefit -- including him. Watch the two farmers. Look how worn out the first one is compared to the second one. The first farmer is working harder the second farmer is working smarter. We need to reward that.

The same thing with United. United Airlines was the largest recipient of cash grants from the US after 9/11, getting $774.2 Million [1]. If the US hadn't kept United alive over the past 10 years so an Airline that cares could fill the void, this little child may not have been left stranded at the airport by a company full of employees who don't need to care.

http://www.laane.org/downloads/ShortchangedStudy.pdf

pcrh3• 14 years ago

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.

mseebach3• 14 years ago

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.

slowpoke2• 14 years ago

Think of it this way: it's a trade-off, like almost all reliable systems have to make. Would you rather have, for example, a server that runs with maximum efficiency but has a high risk of failure and extended downtime or one that is reliable with a 99.9% uptime, but isn't as powerful as the first one?

roel_v3• 14 years ago

"I don't think weather forecasting is currently good enough for a farmer to plan which crops to plant based on rainfall predictions."

It's good enough to offer insurance to farmers for when harvests will fail. This exists, I know because I (even if only at arms length) work in this field.

greedo10• 14 years ago

Exactly. Anyone that thinks farming in the US is a matter of pulling out the almanac and hoping the rain will match expectations is naive at best.

Here's the thought process a farmer goes through in deciding what to plant:

1. What's the expected market price for corn and soybean. 2. What is the cost of crop insurance? 3. What's the current rainfall estimate? 4. What's the cost of water via irrigation and the cost of the irrigation equipment. 5. What's my field rotation state? 6. How much is fertilizer? 7. What subsidies are in effect for the various crops? 8. How is my cash flow?

And so on. The stereotype of farmers either being stupid hicks or suckling at the teat of Federal subsidies is ridiculous. The technology farmers use is amazing, and the factors they have to consider are multi-variate.

Sometimes farmers get screwed, and sometimes they make a fortune. Subsidies (as well as futures and other hedges) are a means of smoothing out the market so that farmers can stay in business while also providing for steady agricultural returns. It's not a perfect system by any means, and subsidies for things like ethanol drastically distort other markets, but to try and simplify it into Farmer A works hard but dumb and Farmer B is a smart, HN guy is just too simplistic.

pbhjpbhj• 14 years ago

>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?

ljf• 14 years ago

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 to Hawaii, and I couldn't believe how rude, unhelpful and almost angry these people were. I mean coach drivers in the UK are grumpy but these were something else. When my partner requested the gluten free meal she had confirmed with the check-in staff, she was told they didn't have anything and was given a bread roll (!!!) and an apple as a replacement.

Returning we flew United Airlines, and again they were curt, unhelpful, and generally annoyed that we were there on their plane.

I couldn't believe that these airlines could be operating in a country that prides itself so highly on service.

As the parent says, these are companies that need to be built up again from the ground up - subsidizing them is not helping them.

briandear3• 14 years ago

The unions are the big problem along with a lack if accountability. They can break baggage laws, for example, with impunity leaving the passenger little recourse except to attempt to sue in federal court.

robk• 14 years ago

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

bdunbar4• 14 years ago

In reality I generally felt VERY well taken care of by everyone I met in retail or service industries - EXCEPT for the airlines.

One problem might be the scale of the company.

Your examples of service industries are restaurants, bars, shops. Owned by franchises or small business owners. The boss is frequently behind the counter, filling in. Bad apples are noticed. And easily replaced.

Delta / United / American are huge businesses. You just don't see a small airline with one or two airplanes, with the CEO loading baggage and flying the plane. Bad apples get lost in the noise.

If my theory is correct, simply replacing Delta with another company is not going to fix the problem for long.

FWIW the last time I flew Southwest Airlines the staff was courteous, had a sense of humor, efficient. I will choose SWA over the competition when I have the chance.

(edit: content)

gnaffle2• 14 years ago

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 runs far deeper than subsidies.

mseebach3• 14 years ago

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.

roel_v3• 14 years ago

What are you talking about? Ryanair is great, it's pretty much always on time, you get what you pay for (which is little, it's a knife that cuts both ways) and because there are only a few people operating each flight (from checkin to trollying around peanuts, which you pay for, so that you don't pay for you neighbour's peanuts if you don't want any) so it's always clear who to ask when you have something to ask.

gearoidoc• 14 years ago

Ryanair is no frills but is INCREDIBLY punctual. Punctuality beats cushiness in short-medium length flights ( < 5 hours ) IMHO.

accountoftheday• 14 years ago

Think of Ryanair as the libertarian airline. Them fucking over the passengers not clever enough to figure out the rules or causing exceptions makes it a particularly joy to fly with them as you do not subsidize others' inefficiency.

jhcoaps2• 14 years ago

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 different crops cost. You have no idea what the weather forecasts were.

You literally know absolutely nothing about the matter.

All you know is that you've got an ideology and that you see absolutely everything through the ideas of your ideology, selectively perceiving, remembering and interpreting events to confirm and reconfirm your ideology. And you're sufficiently arrogant that you think you can glance at a farm and know what tradeoffs they considered when they were planting their fields.

And that doesn't even get into the fact that if you travel via air around the globe, nearly all of the airlines are absolutely terrible, not just the subsidized ones in the US. Thus, it's fairly clear that while you'd like to pretend that your religion explains everything, it really doesn't.

stonemetal2• 14 years ago

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.

What is with the create a throwaway account to insult people thing? Karma isn't worth anything why not burn it under your real username?

dmix• 14 years ago

> if you travel via air around the globe, nearly all of the airlines are absolutely terrible, not just the subsidized ones in the US.

And where are your sources and analysis to back this up?

The original commenter at least linked to a few interesting articles to support his argument.

kalleboo• 14 years ago

> And that doesn't even get into the fact that if you travel via air around the globe, nearly all of the airlines are absolutely terrible, not just the subsidized ones in the US.

Where does this come from? I find that most airlines around the world are absolutely brilliant.

lusr3• 14 years ago

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.

imgabe3• 14 years ago

Your farming example is ludicrous. We need hay as much as we need sorghum. We can't have every farmer planting only one set of crops based how they expect the weather to be. First, it would absolutely crash the market for that crop when the harvest came in, and second there would be none of the other crops that are necessary.

mitchty• 14 years ago

Not only that but you have to rotate what is planted in fields or you'll basically decimate the fields productivity.

The guy putting in hay just got unlucky this year. I grew up on a farm, this isn't unheard of. Also sorghum doesn't grow well in all areas, where I lived corn and barely/wheat/rye were the best crops. Sorghum grew, just not all that great due to growing season. We never ever planted the same field twice in a row with the same crop. Some years we left it fallow (nothing planted) to give it and the microorganisms a rest.

I think the parent poster lacks some fundamental knowledge of crops with his analogy.

msrpotus• 14 years ago

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.

wtvanhest3• 14 years ago

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?

greedo10• 14 years ago

To address your second point, how is it that Southwest can consistently provide friendly service? They have to deal with the same stressors that their competitors face.

Don't underestimate the importance of leadership and management prowess in how employees perform.

jnsaff2• 14 years ago

Simon Sinek in his book makes very similar observations and also has his take on why this is happening and how to fix it.

The book is at http://www.startwithwhy.com/

TL;DR folks this is the "trailer" for the book: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/en//id/848

k-mcgrady2• 14 years ago

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 common in the US (is it?) but I don't know anyone who would even consider doing it.

masklinn4• 14 years ago

> 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 beginning and end of the week, same age, hours of travel on their own.

> Maybe it's a cultural difference and this is common in the US (is it?)

I'm not in the US, and I'd definitely consider that fine. Taking the plane is probably less common around here but considering the plane culture of the US I don't see any issue with it.

> I understand United offers a service to make this possible but it seems like a ridiculous thing for a parent to take advantage of.

1. No it's not, the whole point of the service is to use it.

2. I'm pretty sure United created the service because parents were already sending children across the country by plane alone, that's not a rare occurrence. Most children of 8 or 10 are reasonably bright and can actually take care of themselves reasonably well unless you spent 10 years making them completely dependent.

davidw• 14 years ago

When I was somewhere around that age, my younger brother and I flew to Spokane from Eugene, changing planes in Portland. Granted, PDX is fairly small, but I distinctly recall them announcing the flight, and someone not coming to get us, which made me nervous. So I took my brother and we went, and everything worked out ok.

fleitz3• 14 years ago

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.

peteretep• 14 years ago

As a kid, I used to make intercontinental flights frequently as an unaccompanied minor ... maybe 6-8 a year between the ages of 8 and 16? Airlines make this all OK by offering an Unaccompanied Minor service where where a member of aircrew is responsible for the kids, the kids need to be deposited (and signed for) at both ends of the flight, etc... In this case, the airline screwed up, but the concept is pretty straight forward...

k-mcgrady2• 14 years ago

This makes it seem more reasonable to me. If you drop the kid off at a secure area of the airport, they are accompanied to the plane and accompanied again as soon as they get off the plane until a relative (or someone prearranged) collects them there is little that could go wrong. Obviously, as the article proves, their is still a risk that the airline screws up which I'm not sure I'd be comfortable taking but I can see why many other people would be. Explained like this it seems like sending a child across the world alone would be safer than sending them on a 30 minute bus ride downtown alone.

shrikant3• 14 years ago

Are you me? :) I used to do this exact same thing in the exact same age range.

This was in the 90s though - what I still regard as the Golden Age of Flying (tm), and the Unaccompanied Minor service offered by most airlines was absolutely fantastic. You would be under constant supervision in the airports, get access to the nicer lounges.waiting areas, have priority for boarding/disembarking, and be generally treated like royalty.

Even if you were flying coach/economy.

It was totally brilliant, and I was heart-broken about losing this aspect of flying when I turned 16. (IIRC that's the age limit)

Come to think of it, the reason that UA screwed the pooch so badly on this could be because of the death of the Golden Age of Flying.

DanBC• 14 years ago

The author of the blog post seemed to think that United was a terrible airline before this happened.

So your point about unaccompanied minors seems even more valid; who would send a child cross country, and who would do so using a crappy airline?

andybak• 14 years ago

It wasn't the author's kid.

seanmcdirmid• 14 years ago

In Japan you send your 1st grader kids across the city to school by themselves. They take the train by themselves...and they survive well enough.

andrewfelix• 14 years ago

Used to do it via Qantas as a kid. The staff would watch you like a hawk. They even let you hang with the pilot for a bit.

CaptainZapp3• 14 years ago

Ahh, the old times of flying.

When I flew from Zurich to Vienna with my sister she knew the purser of the flight.

While she was immediately seated in business class I was asked if I would mind to enjoy the entire flight in the cockpit on a jump seat

(yeah, I know: stupid question :) )

Even though I was in my late 20s it was a kid's dream come true.

Needless to say that this was before 9/11 and that this would be completely impossible nowadays.

Which is a shame.

dagw• 14 years ago

My parents sent both me and my sister on planes by ourselves several times when we where kids (in Europe). Now this was a good 25 years ago, but then it seemed like a perfectly normal thing to do and there where often two or three other kids flying unaccompanied and the airlines and great routines for handling it. Basically we'd be assigned a staff member who would follow us from check-in until we where seated on the plane, and then there would be another staff member that met us on the plane when we landed and followed us out to the arrivals hall and made sure we where met by someone.

Until right now I never even reflected over that anyone would find this strange or abnormal.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

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 kid to visit, but you live in L.A. while your parents live in New York, and you can't take time off from work (or you want your parents to get a little time to monopolize the kid).

icebraining• 14 years ago

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.

greedo10• 14 years ago

When my parents split up in the early 70's, I lived in San Diego and frequently flew by myself to Seattle (from age 8 til adult). It was a great experience, and I wouldn't trade it for much. Now as a father of two daughters, I'd be a little less cavalier, but I'd still want them to stretch their wings and learn a little resilience/independence.

thomasilk• 14 years ago

There is no way for a child to become self-reliant if it's overprotected. I had a 40 min bus and tram ride every day to school when I was 7 years old.

Good article on the topic http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/opinion/sunday/raising-suc...

CaptainZapp3• 14 years ago

I've once witnessed how a friend of mine picked up his unaccompanied daughter from a flight in MSP.

I can assure you that handing over the daughter, who was accompanied by an airline employee at all times was not taken lightly.

They very thoroughly checked his identification and checked it towards a list of the person authorized to pick her up.

Alas, this was in the early 90s.

Unaccompanied children are not that far-out as you seem to imagine and virtually any airline (I can speak for Europe and the US, but that probably also goes for Asian carriers) offers the service.

However, it shouldn't be outsourced to some dodgy outfit, which "forgets to send a representative" to pick her up for connecting flight. No matter. It's United's 100% responsibility and the only comfort is that they pay an extremely high price for this (in terms of publicity).

There is simply no excuse for their despicable actions here.

scrumper• 14 years ago

- 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.

potatolicious2• 14 years ago

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.

Rust• 14 years ago

I seem to remember having a 30 minute bus ride to school through elementary school, and if I missed the bus, it was an hour's walk (though I could do it in about 10 minutes by bike if the swampy bit was mostly dry).

I guess I'm fortunate that my parents not only trusted me to do that, but encouraged it.

That said, I have a face for radio - they probably didn't think anyone in their right mind would even attempt to try and steal me...

barbs• 14 years ago

I'm astounded at how terrible United Airlines is, and seemingly always has been. How have they been able to get away with such terrible customer service for so long?

In 1995 I flew with my brother and mother to America from Australia, a 12 hour flight. I was 5 years old and my older brother was 7. They knew our ages, and had seated us with 1 seat at the back of the plane, and 2 near the front. My mother was pretty frustrated. Was she supposed to sit up the front by herself and leave us two at the other end of the plane? Or sit with one of us and leave the other by themselves?

I recently took a very similar flight at the end of last year. I was flying by myself, but sure enough, once the bulk of the passengers had boarded the plane, an attendent over the loudspeaker told us that they were aware that family members had been separated due to seating arrangements and they ask that we please just sit in those seats for take-off and rearrange ourselves once we were in the air. I couldn't believe that after 16 years they were still having the same problems.

pasbesoin3• 14 years ago

Yes, the Management should feel like the scum they are.

So should all the self-serving, money-grubbing, union-busting, career-exporting, not-in-my-backyard scum that have come to infest the U.S.

You want to blame someone? Look in the damned mirror, reader.

mherdeg3• 14 years ago

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 delivery of a child's luggage"). This is of course a very bad thing.

Missing the handoff of an UM from the aircraft to their connecting gate is the same kind of service delivery failure that routinely happens to pax with disabilities who, when the third-party wheelchair vendor fails to show up, occasionally may be stuck at a gate waiting for someone for an hour. It's a really bad way for a third-party vendor to fail.

The unaccompanied minor fee is supposed to cover a really, really good white-glove service, so it's really sad to see this break down. The service is supposed to include a gate pass so you can accompany your minor to the gate; a complimentary onboard meal (food-for-purchase these days); careful handoff of the pax by flight crew to the ground staff who are supposed to be waiting to escort them to their connecting gate; and in the rare event of an overnight delay, guaranteed overnight accommodations with airline staff staying with the minor at the hotel. (This last perk is so expensive to the airlines that in the event of irregular operations that require a rebooking, UMs typically get top priority for rebooking, ahead of all other displaced pax.)

Total bummer to see service delivery fail here.

narcissus• 14 years ago

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 :) ).

bdunbar4• 14 years ago

what does 'pax' mean?

Passengers.

adolph• 14 years ago

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.

mherdeg3• 14 years ago

Yes, I understand your point -- colloquially, one might say that the "child was lost".

Your mileage may vary, but when someone who works for a company has done something horribly wrong and I'm trying to clean it up, I often find it helpful to be careful with my language so that I can express precisely and correctly what it is that they did wrong.

This is mostly a matter of showing empathy, not being a stickler for technical correctness. When I talk to someone who can fix a horrible mistake, and I show that I understand precisely what went wrong and who's responsible without overreaching, I gain credibility and the person I'm talking to (who is after all a person, if perhaps one who has done something horrible) is more likely to believe that I understand them. If I can express that I know exactly how their system works and what part of it broke, it helps them realize that I'm seeing things from their point of view, and this can help bridge the gap between "my side" and "their side" to help them realize that we're trying to get the same thing done.

I've found empirically that practicing empathy with people makes them more likely to try harder to fix mistakes and gets better outcomes. It also saves a lot of time to be able to say "X happened", which is exactly what happened, and not waste anyone's time re-explaining the problem instead of fixing it.

But, again, this is just a thing that's worked for me in practice (as it happens, mostly with airlines). Concise, precise communication about what went wrong, who's responsible, and what I'd like to fix the problem has helped me get great outcomes dozens of times.

saryant• 14 years ago

In my mind, "lost" implies that its location can't be figured out at that moment. While airlines certainly do lose luggage like that, many times the airline knows exactly where your bag is but due to operational reasons it didn't make the same plane.

Sometimes it goes on an earlier flight, as was the case with my bag last month flying IAH-LAX on United, a route where United has a dozen flights a day. If you're connecting, your first flight may have been delayed and they couldn't get the bag from one end of the airport to the other.

I'm not trying to say the situation doesn't suck but there is a certain logic, twisted it may be, to airline operations.

And I'm certainly not trying to defend United's actions in this instance.

bdunbar4• 14 years ago

Total bummer to see service delivery fail here.

You are logically correct. From the parent's point of view the initial impression was 'lost'.

They put the kid on the plane in one airport, she failed to show up at the destination. This was all the parents knew for several hours.

This kind of first impression is going to stick with a person, and it's going to be retold that way.

mherdeg3• 14 years ago

Yes, it's great to be able to attract a lot of consumer attention by telling a good story -- the "United Breaks Guitars" guy certainly proved that! There is an even better option that I would be fascinated to hear whether this blogger used: the Aviation Consumer Protection and Enforcement Airline Service Complaint form, or the "DoT complaint", http://airconsumer.ost.dot.gov/problems.htm.

Domestic airlines treat statistics about these complaints as a core KPI. As a result, filing a DoT complaint has a few distinct advantages over just writing a blog post and hoping it catches on: (1) it guarantees you a response from a senior executive, (2) you can present the facts exactly the way you want (something this blog post complains was impossible when asking a customer service rep to file an internal complaint), (3) aggregate statistics about DoT complaints become public record and can help other people make informed decisions about where to spend their travel money.

In my experience, when you file one of these forms, you get a response within a week from a senior executive in Houston who has read your entire complaint, has investigated the problem, and is empowered to fix it.

It's good for other consumers to file one of these complaints, in addition to writing a blog post, because the aggregate information the DoT publishes can help consumers make better decisions. We actually have data to show that this person's horrible experience was not an isolated incident of a few misbehaving staff who did not represent the company; instead, the data suggest a pattern of increasingly scary service delivery failures. In the first half of 2012, United's DoT complaint numbers doubled year-over-year, according to the DoT's latest Air Travel Consumer Report. (See discussion at e.g. http://consumerist.com/2012/08/united-airlines-now-responsib...).

To loop things back around: the "United lost a ten-year-old" headline would be totally unnecessary in a DoT complaint, because it would rapidly reach an expert who understood the real problem and knew how to fix it.

PaulAJ• 14 years ago

I don't know how accurate it is, but this article

http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

provides an explanation of the chronic financial problems that airlines find themselves in. Briefly, the senior pilots get to negotiate their own pay rates, and since they have the airlines over a barrel they always wind up taking any profit themselves.

Of course that means that airline management is permanently strapped for cash and has to spend the bare minimum on everything else.

misiti3780• 14 years ago

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.

rodolphoarruda• 14 years ago

"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.

axusgrad• 14 years ago

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.

calgaryeng• 14 years ago

I think the moral of this story is not to send your 10 year old unaccompanied on an airplane...

blisper• 14 years ago

2 months back my 13-year old nephew flew from USA to India as an unaccompanied minor in Lufthansa, with a flight changeover in Frankfurt. This is a 21 hour journey. It went off without a hitch. In fact, Lufthansa staff took good care of him, and he had a great time.

gte910h2• 14 years ago

This shouldn't be on HN. Flagged.

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

Related Stories