This part of the story makes my spidey-sense tingly.
I have a hard time imagining that someone from the airline said “oh, sure, that would be fine; never mind that it would be flying under a different name than the ticket was bought as.” Because Delta doesn’t let you do name changes for a purchased ticket, not at any price. Aer LIngus, sure. Delta, no.
But if this was nonetheless the arrangement, and the gate agents were aware of it, then it really seems like they should have scanned the 18-year-old’s boarding pass at the gate to prevent him from showing as a no-show; to prevent his seat from being offered up to standby passengers.
The other slight wtf here is that the family was able to fly out from California to Hawaii with their middle child as a lap child. That’s allowed for a child 23 months old or younger; not someone already fully 2.
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I’d comment on whether I think the flight attendant’s behavior in response to all this was totally egregious or has a sliver of defensibility, but the video appears to have been taken down. All I’ve got to go on is secondhand reports now.
Of course, a lap child should be allowed to occupy a seat and be secured in a carseat if an extra seat is available. It’s safer; the basic reason lap children are a thing at all is actuarial. It’s to discourage parents of young children from driving their flight segment instead, which is much more dangerous still than flying unsecured is. Though this does present logistical issues: do you initially carry your carseat on in the hopes of using it, then hastily run it forward to gate-check it if no extra seat is available?
I suggest you look at my original post again and note the period of the event recounted. It was only about 7 years after the school my brother’s kids went to was desegregated, ffs. That, for an English person, is hard to get your head around.
In those days in Detroit there were, as I recall, mainly white guys on the factory floors and entirely white guys in the offices (except for women secretarial staff). I had recently visited South Africa and it looked pretty similar. I had also been getting similar warnings about not going into places in town that looked “black”.
And then I do something that in the UK wouldn’t even be noticed and I get a gun pointed at me and I think, if that’s what happens to people like me, what happens to non-white people (like some of the family back home)? Are these people actually crazy?
I’m sorry if my observations were insensitive, but if it’s any consolation I’m as disgusted by a lot of what happens in this country.
Oh, I understand irony (and more than anyone on any forum would ever understand about my history with irony since I’d not let anyone on these forums in on that much of my life.) But from my own reference point (and all that that implies), a problem doesn’t seem to become a big enough problem for some people until “irony” is felt and declared. Now, I’m sure you see the point I just made; if that really honestly doesn’t apply to you, then please accept my apology[quote=“Enkita, post:80, topic:100465”]
Presumably you approve of security guards pulling guns on people for no sane reason?
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I don’t see how on Earth you could pull that from my post.
I remember hearing him say in an interview that one of the first steps in his development of a character is to find out what wig he’s going to be wearing.
I’d go you even one further - all I’ve read it looks like the older child flew standby or they changed is flight - at which point he/she had USED their ticket and that seat was then no longer the families to use regardless of what they printed out.
Unless they BOUGHT ANOTHER ticket for the toddler they had no right to that seat and he/she needed to be the lap child he/she was supposed to be.
Best I can tell is that there was an unoccupied seat on the flight to Hawaii that the middle kid was able to use.
The notion that the family’s itinerary would have included 4 paid seats and 1 lap child on the flight out, but somehow only 3 paid seats and 2 lap children on the way back is, again, wtf-ey. That can’t possibly be what set this all up, or at least not the whole story.
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I could see a case for ticketing an itinerary the other way around, actually. (e.g., X full fares, 2 lap children outbound; X+1 full fares, 1 lap child on the way back.) You might want that if a child’s 2nd birthday happens during the trip.
That did cross my mind as a possibility, but it doesn’t sound like that’s what the family did. They specifically talk about buying an additional ticket on the earlier flight, not sending the older son ahead standby or similar. The story is weird, though; I feel like I wouldn’t be surprised by any newly-emerging wrinkle in what their ticketing strategy really was.
Unless they BOUGHT ANOTHER ticket for the toddler they had no right to that seat and he/she needed to be the lap child he/she was supposed to be.
Not exactly; the older of the two really little kids was over 23 months old to begin with. So he was never properly eligible for lap-child status; he should have been traveling in his own reserved and purchased seat from the get-go.
One additional nitpick, btw: the family’s older son is 18 years old; not a child.
Whenever any kind of overreach or injustice becomes public knowledge, there are inevitably some people who desperately need to believe that the victims must have “had it coming” in some way… because that means that such horrible treatment can never happen to them.
