"It's gonna be so much fun Timmy. Daddy even cut a few holes in the box so you can peek out. It's going to be just like your own fort. Ok... now get in."
...tapes up box...
"Tell grandma hello for me. See you in a week"

How the hell does this happen twice in such a short period of time?

You'd think they would have sent a memo or some such, this is a mess. Maybe a healthy round of firings will get the message across.

I think it's important to note that:

The two Continental Express flights were operated by ExpressJet under contract with Continental.

Someone needs to have a stern talking to with this company and possibly make them feel the lesson financially. Even though it's a separate company, they should still be able to handle a child. Of course, this doesn't absolve Continental from responsibility as just like my boss is responsible for his subs work, so are they.

Wow. Two more Continental flights with wrong head counts. Feeling safer yet?

This is actually a GOOD thing for Continental. Maybe they will finally get their heads out of their assess when they start losing a ton of business to this negative publicity.

I'm pretty sure no sane parent will be letting their child fly Continental solo, basically, until hell freezes over.

Well, at least Continental's spokesperson emailed the media to say they take their responsibility to assist child travelers very seriously.

So much for "this is a rarity" and "won't happen again anytime soon"

Heh

It shouldn't make a difference but where does the Expressjet/Continental hand-off occur? At the airplane door? Is it Continental employees in the terminal and Expressjet staff/stewardesses on the plane?

@TripleTheOrder_GitEmSteveDave: Well, in that case, they should probably cut this contract and run these flights as mainline until they can get another regional operator to take over...

@sonneillon: Perhaps it actually happens all the time and these are just two of the many that got some exposure on the InterWeb.

Hey, the article says Continental is "taking it very seriously." Quelle surprise!

Also, gotta love this explanation: "miscommunication among staff members" is to blame. IOW, your gate people were asleep at the switch -- twice in two days.

I blame this on the almighty dollar/greed, squeeze every fuckin dollar for profit each quarter and screw the employees who actually provide service. This is what you get when you treat employees like enemies and subcontract anything possible to save a buck in the short run. Take care of your employees & they will actually take ownership of problems like this & help prevent them.

I bet their PR people are shitting themselves.

@SnoopyFish: I urge you to listen to "The Gift" by The Velvet Underground. You will find it awesome. Also, you will reconsider sending yourself/anyone via post.

Why isn't there a single service with all airlines where the underaged kid is accompanied by a jet-setting yet trained young adult? That way, the kid isn't "unaccompanied" and the adults have some insurance that they'll get to the right destination. It's obvious that the airlines can't do it themselves (because every travel season, it's some random airline that screws up and misplaces somebody) so just fund a third party employing some young college-age kids looking for a fun summer job, helping kids out while touring the US. Airfare paid for all trips, including the last one they'll take back to *their* home, plus a stipend for tourism and food.

@STrRedWolf: I think they should be forced to wear a special vest which has a scrolling LED saying "I am going to ______" on it. It makes them easy to spot, and gives more than one set of eyes making sure they are on the right flight.

i bet continental is "taking this very seriously" HA!

I remember, way back when, in the 90's, I ALMOST got sent to Paris by an airport employee.

Basically, I was young and a show off. And also about twelve. I had recently learned that, amusingly, there was a city named 'Portland' in Maine, when I lived in a town close to Portland, Oregon.

Now, I was headed home from visting my grandparents in good ol' Alabama and ready to board the second leg of my journey through Houston International. I was placed in the hands of what I remember as an almost stereotypically stereotypical slouching, acne-faced, disgruntled looking teenager. He proceeded to grunt something which I took to be 'come with me' after the Delta employee handed me off to him.

We wound up halfway across the airport and, being a clever little bugger, I decided to 'confirm' that the plane I was about to board was headed for the right Portland.

The conversation went something like this:

Me: "So, this is headed to Portland, OREGON, right?"
Gate attendant: "Eh?"
Me: "Portland OREGON."
Gate attendant: "Uh, this plane is headed to Paris."

At that point the gate attendant was giving the airport fellow a rather stern glare. Fortunately this was pre-9/11 so nobody was hauled off by Homeland Security never to be seen again.

The stereotypical teenager fellow then took off at a high-speed slouch to the right gate. Just in time, too. I almost missed my flight.

@IfThenElvis: If ExpressJet is handling the flight, then they are handling the gate as well.

Most regional airports don't coexist between Continental and a regional co-branded carrier. Only hubs (usually) have actual corporate gates and "express" gates.

Might be interesting to point out that Express Jet used to fly their own branded flights under the same name as well as being co-branded as Continental Express. They went bankrupt sometime late last year. Very unfortunate, since they had several convenient regional flights out of my local airport.

This is almost unbelievable. I don't fault Continental (except for selecting Express Jet as a partner) but the bozos who are working for Express Jet need some serious fines or training or something. Yeah, FedEx can lose a package but how the hell do you lose a kid?

@Sheogorath: Aw, but imagine what young mini-Sheogorath could've seen in Paris!

@GinaLouise:
I did end up going a few years later :P

I recall that the first thing we saw after getting on the bus was a strip mall (pun intended) where every shop had some variation of "SEX SHOP" slapped on a billboard in neon-green. There were about a block of these.

Yay! Houston's in the news! ...Oh, wait.

The FedEx reference made me think of this in terms of the Sprint "What if Delivery People Ran the World?" ad.

@coren: The way the second one came out (happened the next day, same lame compensation offer) makes me think that "this is a rarity" is really "we kept it out of the news every other time it happened."

@IfThenElvis: No kidding. Not very reassuring they don't notice either an extra person or a missing person.

@ElizabethD: I'm fuming at the same exact quotes.

They were supposed to be "taking it very seriously" before these two incidents happened in order to prevent them from happening. Why should we believe them now?

I hate it when ass-covering screwups use the 'miscommunication' buzzword to try to neutralize their disasters. So polite and professional sounding, even innocent - like they were trying so hard to do things right except there was a tiny mix-up and no one's really to blame.

NOT!

@flynnfx: I hope a competing airline airs ads about how they take care of you AND your kids, with clips showing airline personnel taking the basic steps needed to get kids on the right flight and safely to their destinations.

It would be so great if SNL devoted a few minutes to Continental this Saturday night. Please SNL?

Ok, I had this job in Minneapolis while working for Northwest last summer. While this can (and has) happened, it's incredibly rare. On an average summer day last year, we'd have about 250 unaccompanied minors.

First off, the kids are given wristbands with their final destinations written in a sharpie (the kind that you need a scissors to remove). In the ~10 years that we did this internally, I believe there were 2 kids put on the wrong plane from Minneapolis. One was last year; the flight was wrong, but the destination was the same. Normally, putting a kid on the wrong plane is grounds for immediate firing, but because it was an easy mistake with relatively little harm done, it was more of a lesson learned the easy way for everyone.

The other time I know of where a kid was placed on the wrong plane was a mix of bad events. The main part of the problem was when a kid didn't want to go to her final destination for whatever reason. Instead, she was able to trick a younger child into saying she was the older kid (that didn't want to go). Unfortunately, the trick worked, and the younger kid was put on the older kid's flight. The employee was fired, but later brought back after things came about.

That said, stories like this are still unacceptable. A few little things can go a looooong ways. For example, we'd usually board the kid before even the general preboarding. When at the plane, we'd introduce the kid(s) to the flight attendant. Simply saying "this is Johnny flying to Kansas City with you" not only ensures the destination is correct, but that you have the correct kid (sometimes we'd have multiple kids being brought to different flights at nearby gates).

Do mistakes happen with this? Sure, but so do crashes. Are they common? Not really, I'd be more concerned about lost luggage. Are they excusable? Not usually. Most importantly: would I trust my own kids (if I had them) to an airline with a program like what I worked under? Absolutely. I do know that it will be different after the Delta merger; half of my time working was dedicated to UM running and they're giving that task to different people, but still: when you consider the fact that the kids aren't really harmed and the odds of this happening is highly unlikely, it's a small risk. Sorry for the essay of a post, but I'm happy to answer questions that I may have missed.

So Continental doesn't actually check if the ticket is for the airplane being boarded?@sonneillon: They're still trying to find someone in the office that knows how to write memos.

So Continental doesn't actually check if the ticket is for the airplane being boarded? If a child can get on the other plane, what about an adult?

@razremytuxbuddy: Their definition of "very seriously" seems to fall somewhere between "joke" and "imbecile".

@ElizabethD: I wondered where they had transferred those gatekeepers.

@TripleTheOrder_GitEmSteveDave: And will also tell would-be pedophiles roaming the airports "Hey, I'm all alone, please take me home with you".

@IfThenElvis: When I flew as an unaccompanied minor (from about 7-13) the gate agent walked me down the gangway and handed me off to a flight attendant at the door of the plane. My little neck-hanger (that told where I was going and who was picking me up) was checked by the gate agent when my parents got to drop me off at the gate (pre 9/11) or when the airport staffer assigned to walk me through security and to the gate dropped me off.... or maybe they let my mom have a security pass, I don't remember... (post 9/11), then by the ticket agent at the door of the gangway, then by the flight attendant at the door of the plane. All the flight attendant were really nice, and gave me extra drinks and snacks and some of those little plastic wings. When we landed I was told to wait until everyone had deplaned (or everyone but the Air Marshall post 9/11) and then my little hanger was checked again by the flight attendant, who walked me up the gangway and into the terminal. Whoever was picking me up was there (even post 9/11, they would make them come through security with a special pass), and once they did ask them for I.D., because I remember my Grandfather being kind of ticked off about it.

This was all on American, though, since it's where my dad had flight benefits, and most of it was pre 9/11. All the flights I've logged after 9/11 I was either accompanied (even if it was a large school group or something), old enough that even though I was technically unaccompanied minor they pretty much left me alone, or 18.

Still... this should not have been even -able- to happen on Continental, unless their policies are just substandard to the extreme.

How is this possible, since Continental took the first occurrence seriously?

When I was in college (early '90s), I once made it through the entire finals week on maybe five hours of sleep and made it down to the airport to get on my US Airways flight to St. Louis. In my mostly asleep state, I didn't notice that there'd been a last minute gate change so I stumbled down to what I thought was my gate and handed my boarding pass to the gate staff. They scanned it a few times as the machine wouldn't accept it and then just waved me on board with a "Just find an empty seat." There were enough empty seats that I just settled in and fell asleep before the plane even left the gate. The annoying part wasn't that I woke up in Phoenix, it was that to get me to St. Louis they had to first send me all the way back to Philadelphia.

@Taed: That's where my money is. Anytime you see in a headline that this is the xth time something happened I say there's a 70% chance the newspaper only considers it news because the initial story was popular, and they want to get in on that.

@Skaperen: I think that is what taking our shoes off at security is supposed to accomplish /sarcasm

@sonneillon: Simple: volume discount.

Where was the mom or dad in all this? If I were sending my child on a flight, unaccompanied, I would take my child to the gate and make sure they got on the correct flight myself. The kids didn't get to the airports by themselves. Did their parent just leave them at the check-in counter? When my in-laws flew to Florida last month, I took them to the airport and got a gate pass so I could help them to their flight. I know they got on the correct flight -- I was there.

Sounds like they're trying to cheap out on the second family... which is what they initially tried to do with the first family. This is not something you try to cheap out of, FUCK CONTINENTAL. It's not just the mistake, but then the subsequent attempt to get off cheap, that makes me hate them very, very much.

@jamar0303: losing a child....crashing a plane....losing a child...crashing a plane. While official blame has not yet been placed in the Buffalo, NY crash of another Continental Commuter plane, I believe the evidence is pointing to Pilot error and lack of suficient training. Worth noting that the Continental crash was with a different contractor. Remind me never to fly with a Continental Contractor.

@jigwashere: Read the stories. Both kids were boarding at regional gates, and there were two puddlejumpers being boarded at the same time through a single gate. So the parents are at the gate, watching their kids pass through the correct Door through which None Shall Pass and onto the tarmac. It was after that point that hijinks...er...confusion ensued.

I sence a remedial training filmstrip coming on:

1) What is a Child - A Child is like an adult, only shorter. Children are usually shorter than adults, and usually have a backpack with some childhood character like Pokeman, Scooby Doo, Hello Kitty, Princesses, or the Waltons.
-BEEP-
2) A Child traveling alone on an aircraft is called an Unaccompanied Minor. This type of child can be identified by a tag around their neck.
-BEEP-
3) Unaccompanied Minors can not be expected to know where they are going. It is your responsibility to look on the tag around the neck of the child for their destination. Verify this destination with the clipboard located in cubby 4c of the airplane's front galley. It may also be helpful to verify with the pilot where he intends to fly the plane.
-BEEP-

@sonneillon: When I was 11 I flew from New Mexico to Jacksonville Florida with a transfer in Houston. I had traveled a lot with my parents and for some reason when CONTINENTAL (yeah...) tried to put me on a plane to Jackson Illinois I (again an 11 year old) had to tell them, "um that's the wrong flight." I was half way down the jetway before they even listened to me. I got the stupid kid look a couple dozen times before they actually looked at my ticket... When you put a cart driver who hasn't passed high school in charge of a child's safty you can see how shit like this happens. Still pisses me off.

@sonneillon: Everyone knows that children get mistakenly flown to the wrong airports in threes.

@Skaperen: Please, the only reason they are at the airport is to fly to meet the cute girl in the next state they have been chatting with.

Why don't you have a seat over there?