I don’t see how the combination of severely restricted space and air cabins pressurized to an average of 8000 feet in the air, sometimes more, will not cause more medical emergencies during or immediately after flights. The latter is something that to my knowledge is not even tracked. Medical evacuations upon landing seem to be a much more common thing than I can ever recall, too. Anecdotally, I have heard of more people who have had serious lung, heart, circulatory and orthopedic issues within a day of a flight in the last few years than in all my previous years of flying combined.
I’m sure some of that has to do with the ages involved and the fact that people are traveling more than ever, but the health risks of flying are real. As long as there is a profit to be made, the airlines will ignore them.
If that is true that the child was over the age that they required a ticket, I hope Delta sends them a bill.
Advice for people trying to scam businesses. If you get caught, apologize and do what you’re supposed to, don’t be entitled and make a fuss about it. Just do the right thing (that you should have done in the first place). And for God’s sake, don’t make it public and present yourself as a victim. I think people just don’t have shame anymore.
However, I haven’t heard confirmation that the child really was over two, so maybe that’s not the situation. Hard to believe someone would make this so public if they were so obviously scamming.
I think there is confusion at all thus point as to whether the “lap child” that this fuss was about was 2 or under and actually legally entitled to BE a lap child. As I said previously, our kids begged for us to purchase tickets when they were under 2, just for their comfort and ours and we scrimped and saved so we could pay for a seat for them, even before they were 2 years old.
Kids over 2 years of age have always required the purchase of their own seat, generally at the same price as all other seats.
5+ hours flight is a very long time to sit with a kid on your lap.
That’s my understanding, too. And according to their FB pages, the middle child was born in Oct 2014, which makes her 2.5 years old. These are the same people, as the mother posts updates on the Delta incident on her FB page.
I hope Delta bills them for that kid’s seat! It has been the law for decades that kids even 1 day over 2 need to buy their own seat in their own name.
It’s appalling the folks try to “pull a fast one,” when they are breaking the law AND inconveniencing everyone on the plane! They have no shame and I wouldn’t want to do business with this bully.
If the parents had to provide the name of the lap baby to the airline and TSA when registering the baby to fly as a lap kid, and they provided a pseudonym “Grayson” - then wow.
I’m sure the airlines didn’t come up with the mythical name–where else would it have come from? The more you read, the scummier the parents sound. They should have just done the right thing and followed the rules like all the rest of us.
They originally had 1 seat for 2 babies. I think it is safe to say the 1 seat was for the older baby (2 1/2 year old). Then they wanted to use the 18 yr old son’s ticket for the baby without a seat. I don’t think it matters which seat which baby was in - they thought they had 2 tickets and 2 seats for the 2 babies. I don’t see that they were trying to take a 2 1/2 yr old onto a plane without a seat. I know you cannot automatically use person A’s plane ticket for person B, even if in the same family, but the airline totally screwed up by lying to these people and threatening them.
If I were the airline, I wouldn’t do business with this family again–wouldn’t sell them any more tickets, period. They are a security threat by making up names, disregarding crew instructions, refusing to follow the law.
Njres, they keep referring to the two year old in the articles as being the issue, and I know from one picture it looked like they had brought on two car seats (if that was a picture from the flight).
And as far as the flight crew, they handled it poorly, but actually, the threat was an honest warning. You can go to jail for interfering with a flight crew, and they would place your kids with someone during the time you are arrested. Nothing dishonest about it. Seems inappropriate to bring that up in this situation, but it is true.
You’d have to look at the case law to define “intimidation.” It does not matter what you or I think, but it matters what the courts have said about that term.
@sorghum, that long, run on sentence in your definition can be confusing to read. I believe you are thinking that 'interfering with a crewmember" only consists of assault or intimidation? It is more accurate if you add the word “or” in front of “interfering”. Here is a list of things that can be considered “interfering”.
I don’t blame them for assuming that they could use the seat they had booked for Mason. When we took our so to college, I found that it was cheaper to book him a RT ticket than one-way, so we did, knowing that he would be a no-show on the return flight. I figured we would have all 3 seats to spread out in. It was a surprise when someone showed up for that seat! I figured out pretty quick that I’d made a wrong assumption, and so be it, live and learn. I had been thinking of the people who buy a seat for their standing bass or cello, not realizing that there were special ways to do that, not just book a ticket for a fictitious “Mr. Cello.”
But I certainly wouldn’t make a stink about it, I just felt kind of naive and silly for not realizing how things work in the modern age.
I bet they thought the same thing, but then felt REALLY stupid for having paid again for Mason’s other flight, and were just scrambling to try to salvage the situation. I think if they’d known that they could rebook the ticket for the little one (and I think our disagreement here may be because some airlines allow it, and some do not - I think Alaska and Hawaiian just have a small change fee, but it sounds like it is not so easy on other airlines), they surely would have done that. Or if they’d known that Mason’s seat could be given away, they wouldn’t have sent him on the earlier flight in the first place.
While you could perhaps make a case that there are security reasons for not allowing a ticket to be transferred to a different person, the real reason IMO is because the airlines have changed how they price seats in the post-regulation, internet era.
When the airlines were regulated, they particularly didn’t care if you transferred a seat, because the price was the price. People would try to sell seats if they wound up not being able to use them. There would be ads in the classified section. And it was somewhat time-consuming to buy a ticket, you generally needed to go to a travel agent or make a call.
Now, prices changes literally every 5 minutes. And you can by 50 tickets with the click of a mouse.
So if transfers were easily allowed, the minute a flight opened for booking, someone would instantly buy all the seats on the plane and then resell them for a profit. Airlines will not allow other people to arbitrage their seats and make money at their expense. Hence, tickets are not transferable.
It wouldn’t be hard to come up with a workable system to allow tickets to be transferred (for a fee of course) that would also satisfy any security concerns, and prevent ticket arbitrage. Airlines can’t be bothered though, they like the system they have where people have to eat non-refundable tickets they can’t use.
And anyway the security reason is pretty bogus, as long as the right name if on the ticket when you check in or go through security. TSA checks are pretty much instantaneous.
