Spirit Airlines issued an apology after putting a six-year-old unaccompanied minor on the wrong flight.
The child was set to fly on Thursday from Philadelphia International Airport to Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers, Florida, to visit his grandmother, WINK-TV reported.
Instead, the boy was “incorrectly boarded” on a flight to Orlando, Spirit acknowledged in a statement on Saturday.
The statement did not address how the error came to take place - during a busy holiday travel day.
This would have been avoided if the child’s ticket was scanned, which I can only assume must not have happened. I imagine this type of error isn’t something they want to talk about any more than misdirecting a kid to the wrong destination.
How shitty of a parent must you be to force you child to fly alone?
I think the word is poor.
Most likely.
I had a job of escorting kids flying alone. This kind of thing was SUPER rare, and the kids were treated really well. I’d have no problem sending my own daughter on a trip alone if I knew they were doing things the same way. But to give some reasons why a kid would fly alone:
Parents are divorced and live across the country
Kids are going to camp in the Midwest
Grandma and Grandpa live in Paris this summer and want the grandkid to visit
For a parent to fly with the kid would roughly triple the flight cost (kid, round trip for parent to fly one way, and another for the return trip), take a lot of time for a parent that just may not be feasible with working schedule (yes, non-shitty parents work too) and if the trip involves crossing an ocean jet lag from a redeye flight with immediate turnaround will fuck anyone up
My kid flew alone every summer to go stay with his grandparents for two weeks, starting at age 8. The amount of security precautions that legitimate airlines use to prevent this sort of thing means this is the first incident you’ve ever heard of.