United is clearly very wrong here and treating their customers poorly. But, and I'm sure this is going to be an unpopular opinion, who sends a 10 year old across the country on a plane alone? I wouldn't send a 10 year on a 30min bus ride alone. I understand United offers a service to make this possible but it seems like a ridiculous thing for a parent to take advantage of. Maybe it's a cultural difference and this is common in the US (is it?) but I don't know anyone who would even consider doing it.
> who sends a 10 year old across the country on a plane alone? I wouldn't send a 10 year on a 30min bus ride alone.
Wow. Overprotective much? At 10 I went to school by bus, alone, with 2 or 3 changes along the way (and a ~10 minutes walk between home and the bus station), total travel time was maybe 45~60mn and same thing the other way around in the evening. And I had friends boarding who took the train at the beginning and end of the week, same age, hours of travel on their own.
> Maybe it's a cultural difference and this is common in the US (is it?)
I'm not in the US, and I'd definitely consider that fine. Taking the plane is probably less common around here but considering the plane culture of the US I don't see any issue with it.
> I understand United offers a service to make this possible but it seems like a ridiculous thing for a parent to take advantage of.
1. No it's not, the whole point of the service is to use it.
2. I'm pretty sure United created the service because parents were already sending children across the country by plane alone, that's not a rare occurrence. Most children of 8 or 10 are reasonably bright and can actually take care of themselves reasonably well unless you spent 10 years making them completely dependent.
I'll second this, in North America everything that is possible to make a child absolutely dependant is done. Parents who try to raise functioning adults are shunned.
There was a national outcry because someone let their 12 year old ride a subway.
You can find most of the roots of helicopter parenting in attachment parenting, the idea that a child should always be touched by their parent until they're about 5.
Futhermore "attachment parenting" is not the antecedent to "helicopter parenting" and certainly does not require constant contact past 1 year of age much less fife.
I grew up in Moscow, before I turned ten I would regularly take the subway all the way to school and back. I find it ludicrous and offensive that some of my peers weren't allowed to walk or bike ten blocks to school in a suburban neighborhood.
When I was somewhere around that age, my younger brother and I flew to Spokane from Eugene, changing planes in Portland. Granted, PDX is fairly small, but I distinctly recall them announcing the flight, and someone not coming to get us, which made me nervous. So I took my brother and we went, and everything worked out ok.
- I wouldn't send a 10 year old on a 30min bus ride alone
That attitude is rather a shame, I think. How are we expected to raise a generation of functioning, independent adults if the default expectation is that kids are constantly chaperoned? The societal dangers are familiar to anyone who's tried to deal with the average intern.
Unaccompanied minors on US airlines are very common. The service works well, most of the time, but when it fails the result is always a lost, scared child and some very angry parents. Headlines inevitably follow. In this case, United's callous treatment is utterly deplorable. Please understand that it's the airline that's at fault here, not the parents for availing themselves of a tried and tested service.
Children are humans, therefore highly adaptable and a lot smarter than anyone thinks. Lone children as young as six are frequently put in charge of an entire family's herd of goats in Kenya; now, granted, there aren't the same dangers from traffic or population density that you'd find in a city, but the herd represents the majority of the family's wealth and it's therefore an awesome responsibility. Imagine herding your parent's entire net worth at that age! Kids that young take the bus - the regular commuter service - to school alone in the UK all the time. I see young kids in NYC taking the subway alone every day. Very, very rarely is there a problem; certainly no more so than a mother doing the school run rolling her SUV.
This is yet another case of modern parental paranoia. Your child's greatest risk factor comes from people already known to you - statistically Uncle Bob is many times more dangerous than a random stranger.
As a society we have a tendency to focus our attention away from where the data leads us. We will act extremely suboptimally to prevent an incredibly remote risk, while ignoring much more likely ones altogether.
If the goal is to prevent child predators, we would do a whole lot better by starting with the people already in our immediate lives, rather than worry about a stranger on a bus.
As a kid, I used to make intercontinental flights frequently as an unaccompanied minor ... maybe 6-8 a year between the ages of 8 and 16? Airlines make this all OK by offering an Unaccompanied Minor service where where a member of aircrew is responsible for the kids, the kids need to be deposited (and signed for) at both ends of the flight, etc... In this case, the airline screwed up, but the concept is pretty straight forward...
Are you me? :) I used to do this exact same thing in the exact same age range.
This was in the 90s though - what I still regard as the Golden Age of Flying (tm), and the Unaccompanied Minor service offered by most airlines was absolutely fantastic. You would be under constant supervision in the airports, get access to the nicer lounges.waiting areas, have priority for boarding/disembarking, and be generally treated like royalty.
Even if you were flying coach/economy.
It was totally brilliant, and I was heart-broken about losing this aspect of flying when I turned 16. (IIRC that's the age limit)
Come to think of it, the reason that UA screwed the pooch so badly on this could be because of the death of the Golden Age of Flying.
Chiming in from Sweden, I also loved flying as a young kid. These days I'm a parent myself and have sent my kids on flights (domestic only) using Unaccompanied Minor services several times, and it's always worked out well.
BTW, in Sweden the age limit for using this service is 12 - if you're 12 or older you're considered old enough to fly (again, domestic) alone, something my 11 year old daughter who turns 12 in a few months looks forward to as the last time she flew alone she felt that she was too big to've been "babysat" on the flight.
Yeah, you're right, I just looekd it up as well it would appear that "12 or older" is the cut-off now for most places. Ah well, those were just better times for air travel.
This makes it seem more reasonable to me. If you drop the kid off at a secure area of the airport, they are accompanied to the plane and accompanied again as soon as they get off the plane until a relative (or someone prearranged) collects them there is little that could go wrong. Obviously, as the article proves, their is still a risk that the airline screws up which I'm not sure I'd be comfortable taking but I can see why many other people would be. Explained like this it seems like sending a child across the world alone would be safer than sending them on a 30 minute bus ride downtown alone.
So long as your kid can handle him/herself for a few hours, what's the big deal? I believe parents are allowed to go through security to meet their kid at the gate, so really all the kid has to do is board, entertain him/herself, and deboard.
As to why, specifically? Well, suppose you split custody of a kid with your ex-spouse, and you live in L.A. while ex-spouse lives in New York. Or, suppose your parents want your kid to visit, but you live in L.A. while your parents live in New York, and you can't take time off from work (or you want your parents to get a little time to monopolize the kid).
When my parents split up in the early 70's, I lived in San Diego and frequently flew by myself to Seattle (from age 8 til adult). It was a great experience, and I wouldn't trade it for much. Now as a father of two daughters, I'd be a little less cavalier, but I'd still want them to stretch their wings and learn a little resilience/independence.
My parents sent both me and my sister on planes by ourselves several times when we where kids (in Europe). Now this was a good 25 years ago, but then it seemed like a perfectly normal thing to do and there where often two or three other kids flying unaccompanied and the airlines and great routines for handling it. Basically we'd be assigned a staff member who would follow us from check-in until we where seated on the plane, and then there would be another staff member that met us on the plane when we landed and followed us out to the arrivals hall and made sure we where met by someone.
Until right now I never even reflected over that anyone would find this strange or abnormal.
I've once witnessed how a friend of mine picked up his unaccompanied daughter from a flight in MSP.
I can assure you that handing over the daughter, who was accompanied by an airline employee at all times was not taken lightly.
They very thoroughly checked his identification and checked it towards a list of the person authorized to pick her up.
Alas, this was in the early 90s.
Unaccompanied children are not that far-out as you seem to imagine and virtually any airline (I can speak for Europe and the US, but that probably also goes for Asian carriers) offers the service.
However, it shouldn't be outsourced to some dodgy outfit, which "forgets to send a representative" to pick her up for connecting flight. No matter. It's United's 100% responsibility and the only comfort is that they pay an extremely high price for this (in terms of publicity).
There is simply no excuse for their despicable actions here.
I remember getting to sit in the flight engineer's seat while he took a break. My grandfather had been a Pan Am pilot, so this was heaven for me. Nowadays they don't have flight engineers, jump seats etc. All squashed up like a bus, and we wonder why they treat us like cattle.
What surprised me most - in addition to the fact that flying a plane is definitely not quite like driving a glorified bus - was the old timey manuals that actually hoged a lot of valuable cockpit real estate.
Imagine about seven quite massive ring binders on the floor on the right side of the first officer.
Today they probably have that all on an iPad. I could imagine, though and given how conservative the aviation industry is, that they still have to lug around the entire amount of paper.
iPads are actually being adopted in aviation precisely to get rid of all the crufty old manuals and maps.
I flew to a conference in Vegas last month on a 737 (via Southwest). Chatted a bit with the pilots and was reminded how cramped the cockpit is these days. Even with multi-function displays, there were a billion levers/buttons/knobs. How they ever were allowed to have a hyper-curious kid in the cockpit back in the day is unthinkable.
I seem to remember having a 30 minute bus ride to school through elementary school, and if I missed the bus, it was an hour's walk (though I could do it in about 10 minutes by bike if the swampy bit was mostly dry).
I guess I'm fortunate that my parents not only trusted me to do that, but encouraged it.
That said, I have a face for radio - they probably didn't think anyone in their right mind would even attempt to try and steal me...
