Twentieth Century Fox / Home Alone 2
In a situation that evokes parallels to Kevin McCallister mistakenly boarding a plane to New York City in Home Alone 2, Spirit Airlines has made national headlines after they put an unaccompanied 6-year-old child on the wrong plane to the wrong city.
The 6-year-old was flying unaccompanied from Philadelphia to Ft. Myers, Florida. They were in the custody of a Spirit Airlines Team Member who mistakenly put them on a flight from Philly to Orlando, Florida instead of Ft. Myers.
When the kid’s grandmother, Maria Ramos, showed up at the Ft. Myers airport to pick her up grandson he was nowhere to be found. The grandmother told WINK News “I ran inside the plane to the flight attendant and I asked her, ‘Where’s my grandson? He was handed over to you at Philadelphia?’ She said, ‘No, I had no kids with me.’”
The grandmother was flustered and had a million questions she wanted answered. Maria Ramos told WINK “”I want them to call me (and) let me know how my grandson ended up in Orlando… How did that happen? Did they get him off the plane? The flight attendant — after mom handed him with paperwork — did she let him go by himself? He jumped in the wrong plane by himself?”
The discount airline apologized late last night week. A spokesperson for Spirit Airlines said “The child was always under the care and supervision of a Spirit Team Member, and as soon as we discovered the error, we took immediate steps to communicate with the family and reconnect them.”
They went on to add “We take the safety and responsibility of transporting all of our Guests seriously and are conducting an internal investigation. We apologize to the family for this experience.”
This story has ignited a discussion on social media about the safety of kids flying unaccompanied. Everyone is entitled to their opinion on it. This Spirit Airlines incident is certainly an outlier but it certainly tarnishes the reputation of it being safe for unaccompanied kids to fly in the care of airline employees.
I flew without my parents at least twice (that I remember) when I was a little kid and recall the airline staff being over-the-top nice and accommodating but I’m not sure I could ever put my own kid on a plan unaccompanied to go visit family. Something about flying in this era feels so devoid of personal touches, like passengers are just cogs in a machine.
The silver lining in this situation is the child landed in Orlando which is only about 160 miles from Ft. Myers, Florida, though it’s not particularly fast/easy to get to from Ft. Myers. But if we are looking for any silver lining, it’s that the child didn’t end up in Paris, France instead of Paris, Texas, or vice versa.