I used to travel 200,000 miles a year or more, so I have plenty of airline horror stories, but this isn’t one. Amanda Green recounts how US Air failed, and American Airlines came through:
Frustrated because US Air wasn’t willing work with him, the soldier made his way to American Airlines and, by chance, to my mother who was working in that terminal. He wanted to know if there was anything Mom could do to help him. Since she doesn’t work for the airline, she did the only thing she could. She escorted him to the nearest AA ticket agent.
And this is where I give kudos to American. The agent not only understood what the problem was, but he went above and beyond to help the young soldier. He not only started working his terminal to see what sort of flight arrangements he could make for the soldier, but he got on the phone to US Air to see if he could get them to do the right thing. Handing that phone to Mom to monitor while he was on hold with US Air, he picked up another phone and placed a call that turned out to be to one of the high mucky-mucks for American.
Read it all.
Let’s hope when he got on the AA plane, his seat was attached!
Charlie – I see USAirways put uniformed service members in First Class almost every week. They let them board first. They go out of their way to help. Not to mention their role in providing free flights to WWII vets to see the memorial in Washington DC in ways no other airline does. So I suspect this snafu was an isolated one.
“Let’s hope when he got on the AA plane, his seat was attached!”
I expect better of you, Mr. Adams. You’ve been around the block enough to know that when an airline is in a labor dispute “things happen” to their airplanes. There really could have been something wrong with the seat installation, though since AA is almost entirely a passenger operation it seems unlikely they’d be reconfiguring aircraft seating very often. There could have been sabotage or, much more likely, the pilots could be doing a “work to rule” campaign, a favorite tactic, and decided those seats looked loose so they couldn’t operate the a/c until the company did something. If it was a work to rule tactic, it has been very effective because the whole world is blaming the company and nobody is publicly even mentioning that it may well be a common union tactic. I wanted to scream a FOX yesterday for constantly throwing up pilots and ex-Democrat appointees to talk about the “safety” issues involved when it is far more likely to be simply a union harrassment tactic.
A few years back I lost a couple of days of my life as Alaska Airlines pilots, then in a labor dispute, found a dent that only they could see in the leading edge of the starboard wing as we were about to depart Juneau. I was headed for the East Coast and if you miss your Seattle connection, you stay at least to the next day in Seattle, one of the more expensive cities in the US. I got to listen to the pilots yuk it up about whether the mechanic would be able to find and fix the dent as my connection time ticked away. Four hours, and two days of my life, later, we finally got underway as they conclued that maybe there was nothing wrong with the plane after all. I had the satisfaction of reporting them to Alaska’s labor relations director and they at least had to do a little carpet dance for him, but it didn’t get my several hundred bucks back for two days in SEA or restore the first day of my conference that I missed.
Most “safety” issues are nothing more than a strategem. If the IAM has a beef with the company, and they usually do, there is always something wrong with the planes that only paying the mechanics more or doing less business with outside contractors will fix. If the pilots have a beef with the company there is always some obscure defect found in their walk-around and the plane can’t move until it is fixed. The flying waitresses do the same thing but they have less authority over whether the plane can fly or not. Whenever a company is involved in a labor dispute, look askance at any safety complaints and in a Democrat adminstration, look askance at any statements or findings by the FAA and NTSB.
Going to Camp Pendleton? He’s a Marine.
Yes with 99.9% certainty. About the only exception would be if he was a soldier assigned to Camp Pendleton on some kind of joint duty. These things are rare but they do happen.
I agree but you’re kinda asking a lot of Amanda’s mom.