Good changes, and I appreciate their transparency.
That is an excellent, comprehensive response to the problem. If their CEO had not initially reacted with a display of off-the-cuff dumbassery, they’d be in good shape now. But that initial impression won’t fade in most eyes.
OK, you’re guys with your pie-in-the-sky, I’m totally sure United is cool, look - I don’t see anything there about promising to stop dropping scorpions on passengers’ heads. I’m going to continue my policy of hitchhiking with passing crop dusters until I finally get in the general area of my destination.
Ken White over at Popehat describes his experience on a recent flight. where a guy is yelling at a family in front of him, how it was de-escalated by CALM MAN, who was not an American Airlines employee, and despite everything, no police presence was noted at anytime.
It will be interesting to see if other sides of this story comes out. Ken’s summary at the end brings up several questions:
This could be a tailor-made look-at-Trump’s-America clickbait story, but I don’t take it that way — Dude sounded disturbed rather than emboldened-by-the-times. I think it’s more a story about the inconsistent nature of airline responses to emergent situations. I’m no cop and do not have tactical training, but I struggle to understand why American Airlines did not have law enforcement there ready for the plane, and why it did not identify people who could give statements. It’s also a story about how effective different approaches can be to disturbed and/or agitated people, and about how situations can be deescalated. Calm Man is the hero of the story; he was impressive as hell.
So at first, my initial thought was how on Earth do you get on the wrong flight and blame the airline for it when they announce everything a dozen times, and the pilot also tells you where you are going. Oh, she doesn’t speak English, and this was domestic flight not international so the additional checks there, like passport checks… not there. Usually the flight attendants do double check any seat mix-ups too except on my Alaska flight, there were not two but 4 maybe 5 people in different seats and the attendant told the last couple with their seats taken to just take an open seat… they sat separately.
Also, this doesn’t sound safe for the toddler at all.
This one is a little more iffy because it seems like the name on the ticket doesn’t match the child.It was the other son’s.
“With him being two, he cannot sit in the car seat,” one airline employee tells him. “He has to sit in your arms the whole time.”
The accuracy of that statement is not entirely clear, as the websites for both the FAA and Delta appear to encourage parents to buy separate seats for young children and use a child safety restraint system.
“We want you and your children to have the safest, most comfortable flight possible,” Delta’s website advises parents. “For kids under the age of two, we recommend you purchase a seat on the aircraft and use an approved child safety seat.”
An FAA spokeswoman told Consumerist — while not commenting on this specific incident — that when it comes to putting a one- or two-year-old in a parent’s lap versus a seat with an approved safety device like a car seat, the agency “strongly recommends that children under the age of two fly in an approved child restraint.”
That Delta thing is ridiculous and shows a clear lack of Delta’s awareness of recent events. How the hell after all that’s happened in the last few weeks do you not have memos out to all your gate agents and flight attendants specifically stating NOT to deplane paying customers that have already boarded unless they are making threats against other customers or the crew (and let security handle those)?
The agent that threatened the mother with arrest and the loss of her kids, that person should no longer be employed. I don’t care what the problem is, that is going beyond what is acceptable. Thankfully both children were too young to understand what the woman was threatening the family with, because that’s the sort of thing a child remembers and experiences the negative effects of for years afterwards.
3 year olds understand this shit and remember it. A cop pulled over my mom when I was 3 (and in a baby seat) and was yelling at her and I cried because I thought she was going to jail. It’s like a core memory, and probably is a reason why I always disliked police. My daughter is 3 and she is basically a fully functioning human. She will remember things.
Yeah threatening with arresting, foster care… they might as well as said they were going to call CPS on them. The agent is completely wrong on the car seat too. It’s weird what the dad was doing though, changing who had the seats. I have no idea if there is an issue with that or not. Larger families tend to switch around seats all the time but this seemed odd… but still no excuse for how the attendant responded.
The problem with the airlines is, they’ve given almost no flexibility for behavior and needs for the customers. We’re basically in a hostage situation on a plane with the threat of being kicked off or worse should anyone cross an employee. As a result, all the power is with the employees, and they need to be trained and disciplined not to abuse that.
The story I saw said the seat the toddler was in originally was purchased for their teenage son, but they sent him home on a different flight earlier (purchased a separate ticket) because he needed to be back earlier for some unspecified reason.
So with the paid for but now empty seat, they decided instead of holding the 2-year-old for the entire flight, they would put his car seat in the empty seat and fly that way. Makes perfect sense, and as the dad said it’s their right since they purchased the ticket and the seat belonged to them. Just because the teenager wasn’t the family member now sitting in it doesn’t mean the airline should be able to give it away. They still had a baby as well that the mom was holding. Anyway, those were the details I got from the NBC coverage of it.
As you say, the airline people were completely wrong about everything, including the car seat thing. And I totally agree that serious training is needed to keep abuses like this from happening to people. Airline travel is stressful enough these days, adding tyrannical gate agents and flight attendants to the mix is a recipe for more lawsuits. Delta should have known better and already addressed such behavior with their people. At the very least, the whole family should have been offered one of those really nice packages they were just touting last week. $10K, a night’s hotel and a free flight home the next morning.
Yeah that bit about the older son leaving early confused me - if they had used his seat to reschedule on a different flight, then they lost the seat they were claiming, but sounds like they just bought a whole new ticket? In which case I can’t see how Delta had any standing whatsoever to force them to give up a seat they’ve paid for and are already using. Jesus, what the hell is going on with airlines?
They were wrong about a lot of things, but it’s true that a ticket generally can only be used by the person who it is originally assigned to.
A few decades ago, you could sell your seat to someone else. Today, you can’t even give your seat away, not even to a family member. So when the older son failed to show up for the flight, the seat was a no-show and the airline could reassign it to whom they pleased.
So the airline got that part right, but screwed up everything else.
Yep. ‘Customers’ are Self-Loading Freight. It’s an industry term.
Everything else flows from that.
I have conflicted feelings about the Delta situation. While nothing was handled well the situation seems fairly straight forwards. As Magnet states you can not transfer a seat. When the ticketed passenger doesn’t check in / board the seat reverts to the airline (with some ability for the passenger to get their money back or credit depending on ticket class and reasons). When the two parents board but the older son doesn’t the ground crew reasonably came to the conclusion that there was an empty seat.
These employees never learn.
Hint United… don’t take a play from the bad playbook that some cops use.
The stories I read said that the parents got assurances from other Delta employees (including the gate agent) that what they wanted to do was fine (at least in this particular case). If the parents just showed up and demand to do this, that would be another thing. Add on the bad optics that they oversold this flight (there’s that oversell again!) means this looks bad for Delta, at least from a PR perspective.
For me, it’s just another instance of tone deaf employees that don’t get that pulling seated customers off of flights falls in the THIS-IS-A-BIG-DEAL category, at least post-UA incident.
I’m not attempting to defend the specific actions of the flight crew. The confrontation on the plane should have been very different. However, I have sympathy for the airlines personnel on the aircraft that are being asked to do something that is specifically against normal procedures (reserving a seat on a plane for someone without a boarding pass).
Assurances from the gate agent (who probably really doesn’t have the authority to make that assurance) help but did the family make sure that this information was transmitted to the flight crew in a positive fashion and at every step? It does look bad from a PR perspective but it’s also, in this case, tone deaf flyers who are asking for special exemptions to the rules.
I don’t think it is at all outrageous to ask that at a minimum the family should have made sure the gate agent was ok with it, made sure that the computer system showed that the seat was still occupied, had the gate agent notify the flight crew, reconfirmed it with the person checking the boarding passes, and reconfirmed with the person stationed as the aircraft doorway without moving on to the aircraft unless they received a positive response or decided to go ahead without the extra seat.
See I can’t much fault the family for this. They asked a Delta employee – and honestly, the gate agent is the only airline employee that is easily accessible to a passenger before boarding – whether everything was kosher, and they told the family that it was.
That’s pretty much the end-game right there. Why would they have ever known or believed that further assurances were needed from the flight crew? Why would they have thought that they needed to bother anyone else with their seating arrangement? If the gate agent wasn’t authorized to make that decision, they should have elevated it to that next level right them and there.
Exactly, I’m not following Madmarcus’s viewpont, at all. Why didn’t the family fill out the necessary form SBD5442rev.2 and submit in triplicate?! Huh?
If the gate agent gave them those assurances, and wasn’t authorized (which we have no clue about, one way or the other), that’s Delta’s problem. As far as I know, it’s completely in the airline’s discretion to let the passengers make the switch. I highly suspect the on-plane crewmember never bothered to consult the gate agent, assuming the guy mentioned that they authorized it.
I know I’m being weird, but bear with me. I expect the gate agent, as the main customer service representative of the airline in the airport, to be knowledgeable and correct about what they tell me.
My thought is that the people on the aircraft know nothing about your conversation with the gate agent. Maybe that seat shows up as taken because you paid for it or maybe it shows up as empty because no one’s boarding pass was scanned for it. Maybe I’m just a little paranoid but it seems obvious to me that you should proactively bring the unusual situation up
Probably so. That doesn’t really effect my feeling that the family didn’t do enough to cover themselves.