Children Lost While Flying Alone

While a lot of the world was keeping up on what is happening with the teenager who was sailing alone, the Minneapolis Tribune had a story last week about two children who were flying alone. This was an interesting story for me, because as a child of divorced parents at different ends of the country, I spent a lot of time with my brother alone on airplanes.

The worse that happened to us was being grounded unexpectedly in Bismark, North Dakota, where at 9 years old I saw the affects of free alcohol on adults. (those were the days when the airlines did things like that to make up for problems), and my 7 year old brother getting lost on the way to a game room in Pittsburgh. All relatively benign incidents.

The story was about two children flying through Minneapolis and one transferring to Boston and the other to Cleveland. The problem was that the airlines put the wrong child on each plane. Thankfully, they were able to find them and apparently get them home safe. One of the children even commented that they got free Dunkin Donuts as part of the deal.

My concern is that while there seems to be new security measures outside the concourse all of the time, the quality of service inside the planes is getting worse. At the same time, the prices continue to rise. This incident really needs to be a warning.