Continental Airlines made a little mistake with sending a ten year old girl to Newark, when her grandparents were waiting for her in Cleveland.
Her grandparents called her father asking where she was when she didn’t get off the plane. For 45 long minutes the father was panicked trying to track down the location of his daughter, until discovering Continental had escorted her to the wrong airport.
Continental states that there were two flights leaving from the same doorway and miscommunication led to the girl being placed on the wrong flight. When the mistake was uncovered, the girl was placed on another plane and sent safely to her grandparents.
Continental offered to waive the $75 unaccompanied minor fee, but the father stated, “You can bet they’ll be refunding a lot more than that fee by the time I’m done with them. My father-in-law laughed when they made the offer, it was so outrageous.”
Certainly mistakes like this happen, but it seems like airlines should be ready to bend over backwards to make things right with the affected family, if for no other reason than to avoid bad publicity like they’re getting.
UPDATE: It turns out that Continental did this TWICE this weekend. They put an 8yr old girl on a wrong flight as well. Read more…
Helvetic Airways used to have a keen pink (or magenta) livery, but now have a much more conservative swiss livery. The airline was flying mostly for SWISS and decided to change their livery to better match.
An Air India flight from Mumbai to Frankfurt had a little scare after the cockpit got warning of a possible fire in the cargo hold.
The pilots of the Boeing 747-400 turned on the fire extinguishers and made an emergency landing back to Mumbai.
It was determined that a 6.5lb of curry that was checked by one of the flight’s passengers had set off the alarm. After a 12 hour delay, the bag was removed and the flight continued .
LAX, which is known for their “close calls” and poor safety record, announced a new warning system aimed at preventing runway accidents.
The $7 million project uses a combination of a runway status light system, radar, and traffic controllers to maintain the safety of all the aircraft and support vehicles.
Lights on the pavement will flash when radar detects a possible conflict between planes or ground vehicles. Once the lights flash, all parties must contact the tower and get clearance before proceeding.
The light system has previously been tested at the San Diego and Dallas-Fort Worth airports. The system caused the number of close calls to drop from 10 to 3 in similar 2.5 year periods before and after the installation.
Currently the system is installed on one of LAX’s four runways and only 8 of its taxi ways.
Have you ever wanted to see what it takes to upgrade the cabin of a Boeing 747-400? Do you have 1 minute and 37 seconds of spare time? Well then, United Airlines has a video for you. United Airlines posted a video on YouTube showing a remodel of first and business class cabins on a Boeing 747-400.
