Not Again…

This week brought us another one of those cases when there isn’t really much I can add to the story already being presented by the news services. But I’m going to tell you about it anyway; because it ties nicely into several other rants I’ve posted recently. According to a story by the Associated Press online, an unaccompanied minor flying Continental Airlines between Boston and Cleveland was accidentally sent to Newark, New Jersey instead. Apparently, there were two regional jets boarding at the same time from the same gate in Boston, and the airline personnel became confused about which airplane the 10-year-old girl was supposed to be on, and put her on the wrong one. The first indicator that there was anything wrong was when her flight landed in Cleveland, and the girl’s grandparents (who were there to meet her) realized she wasn’t on the flight; they immediately called the girl’s father, who then started demanding to know that the airline had done with his daughter…

As it turns out, the girl was just fine; she’d been sitting around Newark Airport while the airline called her grandparents (since that’s who was listed on her ticket as being supposed to pick her up) and told them to come and get the girl, apparently failing to notice that the telephone number and address for the grandparents were in Ohio. Unfortunately, no one thought to call her father (or the operations people in Boston, apparently), so when the father called the Boston airport it took the airline nearly 45 minutes to figure out what had happened. The fact that Continental had charged the family a $75 “unaccompanied minor” fee did not help matters (or the father’s temper); having charged extra to keep an eye on the girl, one might reasonably have expected the airline to actually do so…

Now, obviously this case isn’t an atrocity. Nothing untoward actually happened to the girl in our story, and while the actual resolution of the case hasn’t made the newswire yet, you have to figure that the airline will probably refund the “unaccompanied minor” fee and cover the cost of her ticket from Newark to Cleveland without any further prompting. There are two much larger issues raised by this case, however. First, there’s the rather large number of people who had to have failed to do their jobs, sequentially, for this to happen in the first place. The ramp agent in Boston did not get the girl on the right airplane; the crew on the correct airplane did not check to see why they were short a special passenger; the crew on the Newark plane didn’t ask why they had an unexpected special passenger; the crew on the ground in Newark didn’t think to call the girl’s parents and explain what had happened, and so on. And keep in mind that at least two of those failures are actually violations of Federal law…

Even worse, in my opinion, is doing this four months after another of your commuter flights has crashed, killing 50 people, because the flight crew failed to pay attention to their responsibilities. In the long run, it doesn’t matter if the crash wasn’t Continental’s fault, or if the girl in today’s story made it home safe and sound. All of those potential airline customers are reading these two stories, and considering if perhaps they should book their next flight with someone who spends just a little more effort on the details…

It’s an excellent example of how important your lowest-level customer service personnel can be – any Continental employee, even their lowest-paid airport worker, could have defused two-thirds of this situation with a single telephone call. It’s a terrific example of how you’ve got to get the little things right if you expect to get the larger things right – no one in their right mind is going to send an unaccompanied minor on Continental until this story dies down. And it’s an iron-clad example of how the U.S. Airline industry is destroying itself before our very eyes – all of the extra fees and crackpot “safety” measures in the world will not keep your company in business if the general public thinks you’re a bunch of clowns who can’t even make sure a child gets put on the correct airplane. Especially when they’re right…