Airline Hell

March 21, 2007

Ice and snow storms canceled flights and stranded passengers across the country two weeks ago, so everyone has an airport story, right?
But this one is disturbing. Apparently there was a man with a scheduled amputation in Detroit who was inexplicably bumped off a March 1, Northwest Airlines flight out of Traverse City.
Rob Parsons, who was also traveling that day, first noticed the man when he went to the ticket counter at about 6:15 a.m. The gentleman hobbled to the counter and held one foot off the ground. He was in his 60s, with a full head of gray hair, wearing jeans and a long sleeved t-shirt. With a look of pain on his face, he asked the ticket agent for help.
She gave him a puzzled glance, but didn’t respond. So Parsons walked 30 feet away and retrieved a wheelchair for the man. The gentleman then had problems getting through security.
The man was accompanied by his son, a man in his 40s, and they stationed themselves right off the ticket counter, where the gate agent was swamped with frustrated passengers. A major snowstorm had hit the Midwest, and flights were getting canceled across the country.
In this case, 13 people were bumped off the flight because a smaller plane than originally planned was used for the flight, said Northwest Airlines media representative Dean Breest.

“JUST SAD”
When the gate agent told the older gentleman he’d be bumped off the flight, the son “surprisingly didn’t go ballistic,” Parsons said. “He just said, ‘What do you mean he’s not getting on this plane? My dad is going to Detroit, and he’s scheduled to get his leg amputated in three hours!’ The clerk said, ‘Oh you should have said something.’ The son said, ‘He’s been sitting in front of you for the past hour.’”
Doug Baker wasn’t bumped, but had a bad feeling about the flight and knew he wouldn’t make his next connection. He attempted to give up his seat, but couldn’t get the gate agent’s attention, so he boarded the plane anyway. He told the airline attendant inside the plane that he really wanted to get off, so she told him to grab his bags and go.
“The guy and his son were still standing right there as I got off, wanting to get on, but the guy, the ticket guy there, he was an Air Wisconsin employee. He just acted flat out like he couldn’t have cared less. It was just a bad situation. Especially when this guy, all he had to do was make it to Detroit.
“[The gate agent] gave my seat to this one lady who showed up at the last minute instead of the other guy in the wheelchair who had been waiting there all along. She was one happy woman. She ran over and hugged me. But the
son said, ‘Wait a minute. We’ve been waiting here all this time, and my father needs to have his leg taken off today and he’s got an appointment,’ and that all happened within seconds. She heard what the son said and ran on anyway. She didn’t care either.”
The plane, scheduled to leave at 7 a.m., was delayed by at least an hour, Baker said.
“The gentleman had plenty of time to get on the plane. [The gate agent] just had to go on the plane and say, ‘We need a volunteer to get off. We’ve got a guy who really needs to get to Detroit.’ It’s just poor customer service.”
Parsons called the decision “appalling.” “Here was this man in obvious pain and they let an able-bodied woman get on in his place. It was really offensive. It was just sad.”
Jane Hayes, another bumped passenger, also noticed the trouble.
“The man at the gate was trying to handle it the best he could, giving the gentleman vouchers and trying to accommodate him in some way, but it obviously wasn’t meeting the satisfaction of the son. He was noticeably upset,” Hayes said.
Hayes later saw the older gentleman and the son in the coffee shop. The man in the wheelchair told her, “‘I just can’t believe it. I was scheduled for surgery in Detroit for an amputation.’ He was just upset, as was his son.”

“GONE DOWNHILL”
Hayes said that wasn’t the only problem that morning. She was troubled by the employees’ lack of training.
“It was a pretty crazy morning at the airport. There was a lot happening,” she said. “Even so, I fly in and out a lot and I have never seen the level of inexperience I did that morning. Usually there is some kind of efficiency of checking people through the gate, even on a bad day like that one where there’s rebooking and rescheduling. But we had to go back numerous times to correct errors that were being made. The people behind the desk were doing the very best they could, but it was obvious they were doing it without the training and knowledge they needed of how the system works.”
Parsons agreed: “Every single person who waited on me had problems.”
The story behind the story is that 17 Northwest Airline employees were laid off in mid-November after being given the choice of taking dramatic pay cuts or losing their jobs. They were replaced by contract workers who are employed by Air Wisconsin. The airline hired the lower-paid employees as part of its bankruptcy restructuring.
“None of us were okay with it,” said a laid-off, long-time Northwest Airlines employee. “People who had been working for years all of a sudden got bumped off.”
Baker, who flies about four times a month, said, “It’s just getting harder and harder to get decent help. Ever since Northwest got rid of all the employees, that place has gone downhill. The old employees of Northwest did care. They’d been there a long time and they knew what to do. Now it seems like every time I fly, there are so many little things that keep happening. When we went to Cancun on Saturday, they sent my wife’s bag somewhere else. It’s just an example. They didn’t even tag it correctly. I don’t know how they could screw it up because mine got there. Man oh man, if I didn’t have to fly with this company, I wouldn’t.”
Airline spokesman Dean Breest said that inexperience was not responsible for the gate agent’s decision to not board the man with the scheduled surgery—he had worked with Northwest Airlines for 18 years, and is “very experienced.” The gate agent tried to rectify the situation by offering the gentleman a flight out later that day or the next day. The gentleman opted to fly out the next day.

NO-SHOW PILOT
In another story, Dr. Raleigh Newman, a dentist, attempted to fly out on American Airlines after attending a convention in Chicago.
The date was February 25, flight time, 9:55 a.m., just before the severe weather shut down flights. Newman was there with his wife, and another dentist and his wife from Benzie County. They checked the American Airlines flight status and all looked well, so they checked their bags. At 9:30 a.m., the flight was abruptly canceled.
The flight attendant and copilot walked off the plane and explained to the befuddled passengers that the pilot was a no-show.
Remaining flights to Traverse City that day were canceled, and it wasn’t possible to rent a car one-way to Traverse City. So there was nothing left to do but go back to the hotel, minus luggage… and a toothbrush.
The next day, flights to Traverse City were canceled, so they took a train to Kalamazoo and rented a car to Traverse City.
The pilot’s failure to show up for work cost Newman and his wife several thousand dollars, including meals, a hotel, taxis, a rental car, phone calls, and lost business for
the day.
Dr. Newman’s first calls to the airline were hopeless, given the chaos of canceled flights.
“We called the 800 number and you have to push 14 buttons, and then we finally got a recording that we had to wait for – 204 minutes.”
Last week, he tried again, only had to wait five minutes, and reached an agent to ask her about the policy of a no-show pilot. No real answer. She did give him, however, two free vouchers for air travel.
“With air travel, it’s more luck if everything goes right nowadays. You just expect delays and problems. It’s just the way it is, ever since the airlines were deregulated,” Newman said. “The train, though, was very delightful. The next time I travel to Chicago in the wintertime, I’ll be tempted to go that way.”