Spirit Airlines issued an apology after putting a six-year-old unaccompanied minor on the wrong flight.
The child was set to fly on Thursday from Philadelphia International Airport to Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers, Florida, to visit his grandmother, WINK-TV reported.
Instead, the boy was “incorrectly boarded” on a flight to Orlando, Spirit acknowledged in a statement on Saturday.
The statement did not address how the error came to take place - during a busy holiday travel day.
Really weirdly I was actually thinking about this the other day.
I had a girlfriend that used to work in an airport and they used to have this really archaic system for keeping track of minors. It was a piece of software written in the 1980s and they had to keep computers from the time around because it was never converted for modern systems.
Occasionally the software would just stop working and it had to be reinstalled from floppy disk. When that happened they lost all the data. The backup was, and I kid you not, to take a photograph of the screen after you’d entered the data, and then email that photograph to someone who would then resubmit the data if the program had to be reinstalled.
Even if this might sound crazy to some, it doesn’t sure me at all. Industries are not upgrading systems just for fun. It’s only done when it is absolutely necessary.
I’ve worked with systems running in windows 95. On laptops so old they didn’t have USB. The only way to transfer new files to it was to use serial link (we didn’t have floppy drives). What did that ancient computer do? Communicate with subsea control systems for oil wells.
The entire airline industry is like that. It’s part of the reason we have such big problems when one airport has flight delays- they aren’t able to easily make adjustments system wide.
There’s a really interesting video on YouTube about it. Link