Air travel tidbit: The horrors of the middle seat pocket

by Jamie Rhein on

On Thursday’s Fresh Air, Scott McCartney, the Wall Street Journal columnist who writes the Middle Seat, talked about airplane travel—the good, bad and the ugly. There is nothing uglier, it would seem, than the middle seat pocket. As McCartney says, “Don’t look too hard.”

The middle seat pocket is a metaphor of sorts for the place people can deposit their unhappiness with plane delays, missing an earlier connection, or what they might perceive as shoddy treatment.

They are the anonymous place for sky rage or bad behavior. This is where people deposit items like toenail clippings, half-eaten hamburgers and dirty diapers, he says. As he described it, each are often shoved deep inside so they’ve had time to ferment..

Personally, I wouldn’t dig too deep in the other ones either, although, come to think of it, the hypodermic needle trash I found on the Skybus airplane last summer was in the middle seat pocket. The unopened needle was under the left seat. Beware.

JetBlue toilet seat scandal: Gadling readers react

by Jeffrey White on

Gokhan Mutlu made headlines earlier this week after a JetBlue captain forced him to sit in the toilet for three hours on a flight from California to New York when his seat was taken by an off-duty flight attendant. Mutlu is suing JetBlue for $2 million over the incident.

On Thursday I asked who out there thought that Mutlu seeking $2 million is a little bit excessive. Some Gadling readers responded that it indeed is.

Shane said Mutlu is getting his 15 minutes of fame (which is probably over by now):

I tend to agree with you about American’s being litigation crazy and you ask a great question! But a hard one to answer – he’s certainly getting his 15 minutes of fame at the expense of JetBlue (rightly so) but $2 million is a lot of money and I agree that it’s a bit excessive. If I was the competition I just might step up and make one of the offers that you suggested just to make JetBlue look like heels for not doing it first!

Debbie, of the curiously named blog Delicious Baby, considered the fine line of what Mutlu could have sued for, and also chimed in with her own mistreatment:

Two million seems steep for 6 hours of suffering (I’d be willing to sit on that toilet from California to New York for a mere 1 million.

It would be interesting to know how his lawyers came up with this number. 10k would have barely made Jet Blue take notice of the issue, perhaps the 2 million dollar number is more about drawing attention to the way that passengers are sometimes treated on airplanes & making sure that JetBlue sets some limits on employee behavior.

I fly a lot (and often with two small children). Flight attendants often ask me to do things that I know aren’t right. I’ve had them make snarky comments about me nursing on a plane, tell me I can’t get up to stretch in my seat area during meal service (with the seatbelt light off), refuse to give me more than a few ounces of bottled water to mix formula with (a sympathetic flight attendant sneaked me some later with the warning “don’t tell anyone”.)

On one particularly unhappy British Airways flight, I even had a gate agent decide that she needed to personally inspect my carryon to make sure it had “only essential items that would pass through security” and insist that I could only bring a couple of diapers for my trip from Paris to Seattle!

BrianM got a little biblical with his reaction:

Hopefully the judge is one to think about and offer alternative solutions. Personally, I like the “eye for an eye” approach on these kinds of things. Ground the pilot without pay for a month or two and refund the ticket price. Costs Jet Blue net to nothing and punishes the PERSON (not company) who generated the situation. I sure wouldn’t mind seeing the flight attendant get in on some of that “no pay” action too, since she is the root cause of the whole issue.

The $2mil is just to make the company take notice. Chances are VERY good for a settlement, and I bet if anyone remembers this story after the next day or two, that’s what will be seen.

Some readers, like Sam, are taking the side of Mutlu, saying you need a big number like $2 million to get a corporation’s attention.

Personally I think that 2 million is just an arbitrarily high sum to ensure that he does get everything that is coming to him.

I am not a proponent of litigious activity but in this case I think it is fully justified. Not only was it a matter of discomfort and inconvenience but reckless endangerment.

The comfort of an employee WHO HAD A SEAT should not come before a customer (paying or not) having to sit in any place without a seatbelt.

It was certainly not within standard procedure to make the man sit in the bathroom so I would have thought that making him sit in the jumpseat (which isn’t standard procedure) would have been the preferred measure, as at least it has a seatbelt.

Reader WhatNext put it succinctly:

They disrespected him, humiliated him and endangered him. Now if this was your child…could any amount, leave alone $2M be enough? Why is disrespecting, humiliating and endangering worth different for different classes of people?

And what of the pilot who forced Mutlu to sit in the toilet? That’s what Rob wants to know:

The pilot should have not been able to take off because the person in the toilet did not have his seat belt on. It is the Pilot’s responsibility. Has the FAA contacted Jet Blue for the safety violations??

Keep chiming in on this issue.

In closing, one of the issues behind this whole story was that Mutlu was flying on a ‘buddy ticket’. Just what is a buddy ticket? Travel blogger Christopher Elliott makes that the subject of his latest post, in which he makes the case that a buddy ticket is a far cry from a perk.

Angry flight attendant sets fire to aircraft

by Grant Martin on
Talk about an immature way to handle a tough shift. Eder Rojas, a Compass Airlines flight attendant who was unhappy that he was assigned to fly to Saskatchewan decided that he would get back at his employer, a subsidiary of Northwest Airlines, by lighting the plane on fire.

Shortly after liftoff, apparently Rojas set up his beverage cart then stewed his way back to the rear lavatory, where he took a lighter the paper towel holder. It obviously started smoking, which set the smoke alarm in the cockpit off, which prompted an inquiry from the pilot. Now with the lav starting to burn, Rojas played dumb and he and another passenger quickly had to put the fire out to prevent the entire aircraft from going up.

Once the feds started asking questions and found the lighter in an overhead bin, Rojas fessed up to sneaking the contraband past security and starting the fire.

How foolish and angry do you have to be to try to start your aircraft on fire while it’s traveling at 600MPH? While the maximum penalty for his crime is twenty years in prison, the fact that he put seventy six lives at risk should call for a public beating and some time in a stockade.

Wegolo.com: My new favorite low cost flight-booking engine

by Abha Malpani on

From next week, my traveling schedule is exciting but ridiculously hectic. Madrid-Seville-Madrid; then Madrid-Dubai-Muscat-Dubai-Madrid, then Bristol-Darlington-London-Madrid, all within the month of June. I’m short on time at each destination so want to fly where ever I can to save time but don’t want to break my bank either.

Madrid is not a very well connected city for cheap flights, the only budget airline here is Vueling, but the places it flies to is limited. Also, trying to go to individual budget-airline websites and booking on multiple sites is just a pain in the neck, so after a few hours of being depressed looking at my possible flight bills, I was thrilled when I found Wegolo.com.

It’s awesome because it searches 75 airlines that are ONLY budget airlines, to your destination. It gives you all flight options, you can search dates before and after your selected dates, and it completely omits traditional airlines — so all the options it shows are the cheapest possible. Because of the number of airlines it searches through, it’s easy to book multiple flights from multiple destinations without having to get off the site — it just makes things so much easier!

All information is updated in real-time, there are no hidden costs, all airlines they search have: e-ticketing facilities, you can buy with Visa, MasterCard and American Express, and booking confirmations in English. I’m quite relieved to find this site! Do check it out.

Parents forget baby at airport and fly to destination

by Abha Malpani on

I’m still trying to get my head around how this was possible: a couple and two grandparents FORGOT their 2-year old whilst trying to catch a flight from Vancouver to Winniepeg in Canada.

With only 10-minutes left for boarding, the family was running towards the gate, and apparently each of the 4 adults thought that the baby was with one of the other three.

HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE? Were they running so far from each other not to notice the absence a child? Also, their child is 2-years old, if you are adults running to catch a flight, surely you’d take him in your arms — couldn’t they see that no-one was running with a baby!? AND, even if you are not sitting together on the flight, how can you not realize that one of you is missing!? What world are you in!? This stuff is only allowed to happen in movies!

Anyway, the good news is that Air Canada took control of the situation well: they found the child, figured out who he belonged to, and put him onto another flight to regroup him with his family.

I think this is inexcusable and such families shouldn’t have children at all.