- American Airlines is being sued by a man for allegedly misplacing his wife’s body for four days. According to the lawsuit, the body was so badly decomposed when it finally arrived that they had to forego a traditional open-casket funeral.
- Shares of United Airlines stock tanked on Monday(Forbes reports) when a six-year-old Chicago Tribune story resurfaced as new news. The stock fell, and has subsequently risen, but not to its former level. How could such a thing happen? The newspaper’s owner, Tribune Company explained that the archived story on their site received enough traffic to push it to Popular Business Stories: Most Viewed on their site and was not republished. The automated systems that run Google News noticed the link added it to their system. Google News Readers started reading it on the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s site. A Florida investment firm found it with a Google Search and posted a summary on Bloomberg. A shocking example of how computers mixed with human factors can cause change on a large scale.
- CNN Money reports on a passenger whose flight on Delta was cancelled due to weather. Since other airlines’ flights were going, he asked for a refund so he could book one of those flights. Delta refused, even though their policy denies compensation for weather, not refund. In the event any airline does not operate the flight, even if it is due to weather, you are entitled to your money back. The passenger filed a claim against the airline for the cost of his ticket on JetBlue in small-claims court. When they failed to show up, a default judgement was issued against Delta.
- Last month, a passenger departing on a flight from Oakland to Boston ended up in a standoff with the TSA over her bra. The passenger, a large-breasted woman wearing a large underwire bra set off the metal detector and objected to being patted down in that area as a violation of her privacy, which we perfectly understand.
We have many more tales of horror scrounged from the Internet from over the last few months. Passengers are horrified at the way airlines and the TSA are treating them.