Gosh, I remember when I was 7, flying from Miami to Boston all alone. Unfortunately, the plane was diverted to Newark, so I had to rent a car and drive to Boston.
Well, I stopped at a strip club in Worcester for a couple beers, and when I leave the bar, my rental car wouldn’t start - it seems the carburetor valve is stuck. So I jury-rig the carburetor with a clothespin for the last 40 or 50 miles.
Of course my parents were furious with the airline (and the rental car company, for that matter).
We did get some free tickets, but not because of the above mishap. Instead it was because I had single-handedly foiled a hijacking attempt (did I forget to mention that?)
I don’t fly often, but one thing I don’t understand is that every time I’ve flown, I’ve needed, like, a boarding pass or something to get me on the plane. After hearing about this incident, I’m thinking if I play my cards right, I can book a flight from here in Raleigh to…oh, say, Greensboro, and land in Vegas. That would be cool.
Whether this is a formal arrangement with the airlines or not, I agree with UncleBeer’s original comment. Obviously, a lot of people don’t agree with me, but I find the whole situation too chaotic and unpredictable to have my child navigate alone no matter how intelligent. Plus, I always go on the assumption that no one else (except her father) is as interested in her well-being/safety as I am and take the most amount of precautions I can. I can’t see how anyone would entrust the care of their child (under 15) to complete strangers hundreds of miles away. (I’m not making value judgements on people who do.)
I started flying by myself when I was, technically, too young to fly unaccompanied - 4 or 5. I had absolutely no clue about what was going on. I just followed the airline employees and sat where they told me to sit and did what they told me to do. If the airline people had told me to get on the wrong plane, I would have done it, at that age, and would not even have known until I got to the other end and no one was there waiting for me. Later on I could navigate an airport alone, but not really until I was 10 or so, and I was by then a very experienced flyer.
Let me say this, though: MandaJO is right. The babysitting service is very formal, and underage kids can’t fly without it. It has all kinds of extra precautions - lots of things to be signed, labels slapped on the kids, rules and instructions issued, procedures rigorously followed, etc. - and the kids are NEVER left alone. And, yes, my grandparents did have to show ID to get me, and I had to indicate that they were actually my grandparents, too. The airline employees took it all very seriously. (So seriously that it was embarrassing by the time I was 8 or so.)
Disclaimer: most of the flights I took as a really young child were on a ‘child custody’ route, so lots of unaccompanied kids flew on the planes I was on; my parents booked me to fly on Friday and Sunday nights just so that I would not be the only unaccompanied child. Usually, there were five or more kids on those planes, all clustered into a sort of kid clump, and the older kids told the younger ones everything they needed to know about airline travel. (“Ask for extra barf bags. They’ll give them to you to draw on, just to keep you quiet.” “You can get a different snack if you want.” “If you cry during takeoff, you’ll get candy and gum for your ears.” “Look for the jackrabbits!” “Wait. We aren’t allowed to get off the plane yet.” And so on.) This is how I acquired most of my air travel savvy, and without those older custody kids I probably have been much less comfortable and happy.
Oh, and one final thing: I have no problem with kids flying alone AS LONG AS IT IS A DIRECT FLIGHT. Kids should not be changing planes by themselves; that’s where the problems can occur, and it’s just way too confusing for the littler ones. At least, it would have been too confusing for me at that age.
Thank you, Mornea. I was starting to think that I was the only one here that finds the idea of small children flying by themselves horrifying. Parents teach their children about stranger danger, and how to look after themselves on the way to school and back, then they turn them over to complete strangers to look after them for an airplane trip? If they don’t send the child out completely on their own?? This isn’t making sense to me. If anything happened to your child en route (and I can think of a whole bunch of ways for a predator to take advantage of this), the airport would be very, very apologetic, but that wouldn’t get your kid back to you safe and sound, would it?
I can’t judge other people, either; I’m sure the parents who do this have very good reasons for it, but I still think this is a very dangerous situation to put children in.
I dunno. To me it seems fairly natural. I’m sure the laws are stricter now than they were in the 70s when I was flying unaccompanied, too. We’re actually looking forward to when Dominic is old enough to fly alone so he can go spend more time with various relatives. Right now we can’t afford to do much state-hopping other than by car, and a lot of our family is out of reasonable driving range.
Okay, so an airline employee screwed up. This happens. I’m sure it was pretty scary for the girls, being lost rather like someone’s luggage. I don’t think it’s news. I sincerely hope the mother was taken out of context with the whole “tickets for life” thing. Please, tell me someone that greedy, opportunistic, and stupid didn’t reproduce.
But come on, it’s not as if they ended up in Hong Kong. They were cast adrift in the savage wilds of Ontario … I think they’ll get over it.
Just a bit to add: the kids weren’t stupid. I saw them interviewed on Good Morning America the other day, and they knew they were being put on the wrong plane. They even brought it to the attention of their (airline/port provided) escort, and asked the escort why their luggage (which they could see being loaded) was being put on a different plane than they were. The escort’s response? They didn’t know. Went ahead and put the kids on the wrong plane anyway. You try asserting your authority over adults when you’re 11.
The “free flights for life” remark I took to be a bit intentionally facetious, but I understand the sentiment.
