An unaccompanied 6-year-old boy was put on the wrong Spirit Airlines flight from Philly to Florida
Casper, an unaccompanied 6-year-old boy, was supposed to fly from Philadelphia to Fort Myers to visit his grandma. Instead, he wound up in Orlando.
It’s a Christmas nightmare, or at least a scene straight out of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.
Spirit Airlines placed Casper, an unaccompanied 6-year-old, on the wrong flight last week when he was supposed to fly out of Philadelphia International Airport to visit his grandmother in Fort Myers, Fla. He instead landed more than 160 miles away, in Orlando.
It was Casper’s first flight, his grandmother Maria Ramos told local news station WINK TV. Ramos said she ran inside the plane to confront the flight attendants when Casper didn’t land at the Southwest Florida International Airport.
Ramos said one of the flight attendants told her Casper missed his flight.
“I asked her, ‘Where’s my grandson? He was handed over to you at Philadelphia?’ She said, ‘No, I had no kids with me,’” Ramos said to WINK TV.
Ramos drove four hours to pick up Casper in Orlando after he called her and told her where he was. Spirit has offered to reimburse Ramos for the trip, as well as cover Casper’s flight back to Orlando — alongside round-trip airfare for Ramos so she could accompany him.
Ramos has been dissatisfied with the response from the budget airline, which allows children ages 5 to 14 to travel as unaccompanied minors on direct domestic flights. Under the policy, children flying solo are supposed to be taken on board and given a snack and a drink.
“I want them to call me. Let me know how my grandson ended up in Orlando,” Ramos said. “Did they get him off the plane? … Did [the flight attendant] let him go by himself?”
Casper was “incorrectly boarded” on the flight to Orlando, but “was always under the care and supervision of a Spirit Team Member,” the airline said in a statement.
“We take the safety and responsibility of transporting all of our Guests seriously and are conducting an internal investigation,” Spirit Airlines said. “We apologize to the family for this experience.”
Ramos is now considering legal action against Spirit after she claims the airline failed to properly contact her or provide meaningful answers. Ramos told WINK-TV the first time she heard directly from Spirit was Wednesday, five days after the incident.
“You have cameras in your plane. You have cameras all over. You’re telling me you don’t know what happened to Casper?” she said.
Spirit Airlines disputes this. “As soon as we discovered the error, we took immediate steps to communicate with the family and reconnect them,” they said.
A spokesperson for the Transportation Security Administration told the Washington Post that the agency wouldn’t get involved in the incident.
It’s uncommon for unaccompanied minors to be lost or placed on the wrong flight, but these mishaps have happened in the past.
In 2016, JetBlue Airways settled a lawsuit with Maribel Martinez, who claimed the airline mixed up her then 5-year-old son with another boy traveling solo. When Martinez went to pick up her son at John F. Kennedy International Airport, the suit said, she found a random boy. Her child, meanwhile, was given to a stranger at Boston Logan International Airport.
And in 2019, United Airlines placed a 14-year-old boy traveling alone from North Carolina to Sweden on a flight to Germany during his layover in Newark International Airport. That time, the plane returned to the gate before takeoff so the child could leave.