Southwest Airlines is apologizing to a Clarksville, Tenn., family and investigating how a 9-year-old girl flying as an unaccompanied minor from Nashville to New York on Tuesday ended up re-routed and delayed for five hours without the airline notifying the family.

Chloe Boyce is fine and will be getting a special patch from her junior Girl Scout troop to mark her adventure, but her mom, Elena Kerr, is upset.

“The flight arrived and my daughter didn’t get off,” Kerr told me. “Someone went on the plane to see if she was there and my sister called me and said, ‘Where’s Chloe?’ The Southwest guys told her there were no unaccompanied minors on that flight.”

Kerr had put Chloe on a flight in Nashville headed for New York’s LaGuardia Airport with scheduled stops in Columbus and Baltimore.

Southwest’s policy only allows unaccompanied children to be booked on itineraries that don’t include plane changes. Chloe’s flight, however, made an extra stop in Cleveland due to weather, and upon arriving in Baltimore she was rebooked on another flight to New York.

Unfortunately, no one from the airline called Kerr to inform her of the delay. The airline also did not contact Chloe’s aunt, who was waiting at the gate in New York.

Kerr said she started frantically calling Southwest and that it took more than an hour for the airline to locate Chloe and even longer to explain what happened.

“At BWI, the flight attendant took her off the plane, walked her to Hudson News to get her a drink and some snacks and the pilot bought her dinner,” Kerr told me. “But while she was there no could tell us where she was.”

Kerr said her family is a military family that has spent time living in Alaska and that she understands delays. “We just don’t understand why we weren’t called, especially because the Southwest policy states that someone must be available to answer phone calls during the flight time in the event of a flight irregularity.”

Southwest Airlines has apologized to Kerr and refunded the cost of Chloe’s ticket.

“Our unaccompanied minor policy aims to minimize these kinds of situations … by only ticketing them on itineraries that don’t require an aircraft change,” said Southwest spokesperson Brad Hawkins via email.
“In this case, the unscheduled change of planes resulted in the connection, a delay and distress for the family which we certainly regret and have apologized for in our conversation with the family of our customer.”

Kerr is not convinced she should let Chloe fly alone again.

“We don’t trust Southwest,” said Kerr. ” I’m going to be driving the 17 hours to New York to get her.”

(A slightly different version of this story first appeared on msnbc.com)

Categories: Air Travel, Kids, Kids travel
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Each Sunday StuckatTheAirport.com takes a look at the souvenirs you can get when you’re stuck at the airport.

This week, the souvenirs come from the sky, courtesy of Fly the Branded Skies, an airline-focused website that has a section devoted to the junior wings just about every airline used to hand out to young passengers.

Delta and a few other airlines still do hand out junior wings, but instead of metal the modern-day wings are plastic or, in some cases, merely a sticker.

Categories: Air Travel, Airlines, family travel, Fun Stuff, Kids, Kids travel, Souvenir Sunday, Souvenirs
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JetBlue and PBS kids have rolled out a fun literacy program that will not only entertain kids, but help keep the cabin noise level in check.

The program has several elements, but here at StuckatTheAirport.com we’re most pleased to learn that kids on JetBlue flights this summer will receive a free activity kit with reading games, including this fun word find exercise.

Kids and their parents can also download a reading activity kit, create a summer reading list, log reading minutes and do other activities. And for every reader that registers on SoarwithReading.com, JetBlue will make a book donation to a child through First Book, up to 10,000 books.

Soar with Reading will also be giving $10,000 worth of children’s books to one community’s library. Another library will receive $2,500 worth of books and five other libraries will receive $500 worth of books, courtesy of Random House Children’s Books and JetBlue. You can nominate a library and, as a reward, be entered to win a vacation package to the Bahamas.

So it’s win-win-win all around.

Categories: Air Travel, Kids, Kids travel
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For Washington Journey Online, I put together a story about the country’s newest and perhaps most unusual waterpark, which opened June 6, 2011 on the grounds of the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.

The museum is best known for being the home of the giant Howard Hughes HK-1 “Spruce Goose,” which made a short, single flight back in November, 1947, as well as a wide variety of spacecraft, helicopters and military, commercial and personal aircraft. An extensive firearms collection, historical artifacts, an IMAX 3D theater and many educational exhibits are also on-site.

So while it may seem strange that an aviation museum would build its own water park, it makes perfect sense that an aviation-themed water park is what got built.

And the aviation-theme is impossible to miss: the new Wings and Waves Waterpark has as its centerpiece a Boeing 747-100 airplane mounted on the roof of a 60-foot tall building.
Inside the building, there are colorful, scream-inducing slides, a giant wave pool, a water vortex and a multi-level play structure with slides, water guns, spouts and buckets and a helicopter that hovers overhead and occasionally dumps 300 gallons of water on those below. The park even has its own museum: the H2O Museum has more than two dozen interactive exhibits and explains concepts such as Bernoulli’s Principle, the water cycle and jet propulsion.

Splashdown Harbor, the 91,000 wave pool, sits in the center of the waterpark and offers swimmers eight different wave motions as well as depth charges and bubblers. A 20-foot wide high-resolution video screen by the pool is slated to show everything from NASA splashdown videos to feature films during the park’s planned “Dive-in” movies events.

And, then, of course, there are the rides. The park has 10 water slides, with four main slides coming directly out of the belly of the rooftop airplane. The yellow Sonic Boom slide, with its open top, is designed for novice riders. The green Nose Dive is just that: a two-person inner-tube ride that starts with a big drop and winds its way to the pool. The fully-enclosed blue Tail Spin speeds riders through a series of tight, figure-eight, high banking curves. And then there’s the Mach 1: described as a “test your mettle ride,” this high-speed, enclosed-body slide requires riders to descend 60 vertical feet on their backs, with their arms and legs crossed.

Sound like fun? Here are the details:

The Evergreen Wings and Waves Waterpark sits just west of the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, which is 3.5 miles southeast of McMinnville, Oregon, on Highway 18. It’s about an hour from Portland and 40 minutes from Salem.

Categories: Airlines, aviation, Entertainment, Fun Stuff, Kids, Uncategorized
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A play area based on the stories and illustrations of noted Swedish children’s books author Elsa Beskow has opened at Stockholm Arlanda Airport.

A collaboration between a local children’s museum (Junibacken) and the airport, the play area invites kids to ride on a field mouse, pick giant blueberries, slide down a giant mushroom and interact with a wide variety of characters and scenes from the books. There’s also a corner for watching movies, reading and playing games.

Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with Beskow’s stories. You can get an idea of her magic by just skimming the titles, which include Hat Cottage (1930), Children of the Forest (1910), Peter in Blueberry Land (1901), Olle’s Ski Trip (1907) and The Sun Egg (1932), or sitting down and reading one of her books, which will be stocked at the play area in a variety of languages.

Here’s more on Elsa:

Elsa Beskow was a master at depicting Swedish nature, which comprises a key element in all her work. Her books are widely published in other languages, and she is considered the author who introduced Swedish children’s books to the rest of the world. Peter in Blueberry Land was the first book to be translated, into German in 1903, into Danish in 1912, and into English in 1931. Today Elsa Beskow’s books have been translated into 19 languages.

Categories: Airports, Entertainment, Exhibits, family travel, Fun Stuff, Kids, Uncategorized
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