Cutching two Cabbage Patch Kids and blinking in the bustle of an O`Hare arrival area, Tricia Goertz, age 7, stepped off the Continental Airlines flight from Los Angeles. Her uncle Morgan Boyer stood ready to retrieve her, but before he could, a Continental attendant checked Boyer`s credentials to make sure he was the adult authorized to pick her up.
A passerby struck up a conversation while the grownups completed their paperwork. ”These are my babies,” Tricia explained, bending her blond head protectively over the dolls. ”This one, Casey, was on his first flight. The girl was on her second. Her name is Emma.”
For the second time in two years, Tricia was making her way to her grandparents` house in Kalamazoo, Mich., where she would spend the next six weeks. From the time she was dropped off at Los Angeles International until her uncle picked her up at O`Hare for the drive to Michigan, Tricia and her kids were traveling all by themselves.
Minutes before Tricia`s plane landed, Marcus Rogers, 9, boarded a United flight to Salt Lake City for the final leg of a journey that would whisk him from his school-year residence with his mother near Orlando to another of his periodic visits with his father. Marcus makes similar trips four or five times a year with no other company than his Transformer robot figurines.
”I really liked the food today, because I was hungry,” he reported.
”We had ham sandwiches. I could have had chicken, but I took ham because I had chicken for dinner last night.”
Tricia and Marcus said they did not expect anything extraordinary to happen during their time away from their respective home bases. Tricia would hang around with cousins in Kalamazoo. Marcus would undertake a few rounds of miniature golf with his dad and ”play Transformers with some kids in the neighborhood.”
An adult watching unaccompanied minors make their connections at O`Hare might be struck by the routine nature of the childrens` travels. Most of them wear expressions that plainly state, ”no big deal.”
Two modern trends, divorce and low air fares, have combined to send children through the skies regularly with airline personnel serving as babysitters enroute. All during the summer, minors will be shunted through the airports in unprecedented numbers.
”This is the time of year when the shards of broken marriages go hurtling across the country,” observed one thrice-divorced father with jet set progeny.
Airline personnel guess that family splits may account for the bulk of the children they take under their wings, but they keep no firm statistics on it. They also see plenty of kids heading for summer camps, returning from boarding schools or simply dropping in on old friends.
The children add up to a sizeable percentage of warm-weather passenger lists. An estimated 500,000 of them will be taking to the skies this season.
”It`s a major portion of our operation, keeping track of these kids during the summer months,” said K.C. Dawe, a staff assistant in United`s customer-service department. ”Right now, we`re handling about 125 unaccompanied minors a day. We anticipate that around the 4th of July, and through the summer, the number will go up to 500 a day. And those are just the kids making connections with us at O`Hare.”
All airlines have established specific procedures for such journeys, and they vary only in minor details from one line to another. Most refuse to accept unaccompanied minors under five years of age and require that the youngest ones travel from point to point without stopovers. Children 12 and over may travel without supervision, unless their parents request it.
Children requiring attention are charged full adult fares, plus a special ”handling fee,” usually $20, for those who make connections. Attendants stay with their little passengers at all times, pin identifying badges on them and stuff elaborate manifests into their ticket folders, complete with the phone numbers of responsible parties and all pertinent schedule information.
Security can be strict to the point of inconvenience. Not long ago, Lincoln Park mother Shelly Andreas pulled into a temporary parking area at O`Hare and sent her babysitter to fetch Eric, 11, and Regan, 10, who were returning from a visit with their father in Decatur, Ill. Eric and Regan had flown the route dozens of times.
”The people at Britt Airways wouldn`t let the children go,” Andreas said. ”One of the attendants even knew the sitter. But I had to get out of the car and go show them my driver`s license.”
Andreas, of course, realizes that such diligence on the airline`s part is the very reason she can relax when her children take to the air. ”Eric and Regan started flying when they were six and seven,” she said, ”and that first time, I was extremely worried, frantic. But they take such good care of them, we don`t think about it any more. I don`t even ask the kids to call me after they land. My ex-husband and I just call each other with the flight numbers and arrival times, and that`s it.”
Barbara Baer, a United Airlines customer service representative and former flight attendant, wishes more divorced parents could communicate even that well.
”A big majority of the kids who come through O`Hare have divorced parents,” Baer said. ”Usually, they`re off to see one parent for the summer. Some of the tales those kids tell are just unbelievable–how the mother`s been married eight times, that kind of stuff. Sometimes, we`ll accept a child and ask for the phone number of the person at the other end, the one picking the child up. The parent will say, `I don`t know. I haven`t talked to that s.o.b. in 10 years.”`
Nancy Pond-Smith, a Continental flight attendant with 19 years on the job, said, ”There are always a few horror stories. I remember flying with a child who had to go live with his father. He cried all the way. Sometimes the trips are a little traumatic for them.
”One time I had a little girl on board who was very hyper, very nervous. She wanted me to sit there with her and talk, but I had a meal service to do. So I let her help me. She followed me down the aisle, handing out peanuts while I made the drinks.
”A lot of the others just sit there quietly, or simply enjoy themselves. Last December, there was a little girl who had been to see her grandmother. The girl was all dressed up, looked like a little Junior Leaguer. She had a Cabbage Patch doll with her, and she proceeded to introduce her `daughter` to everyone on the flight. Midway through the trip, I was surprised to hear the girl ringing her call bell. When I got to her seat, she said, `I have to apologize for my daughter. She had an accident.` And then she handed me a tiny toy disposable diaper.”
Sometimes, like all the girls with their Cabbage Patch dolls, the tykes make better parents than the parents do. Almost every attendant who deals with minors remembers children who were left at the airport entrance to fend for themselves or who lacked the elaborate documents required for certain international flights.
Dan Morgan, Continental`s manager of passenger service planning, recalls an incident last year, when a little boy arrived in Houston on a flight that landed at 10 p.m. ”There was no one there to meet him,” Morgan said, ”so the attendant called the parents` telephone number in a little community just outside Houston. The father answered and said he`d be right over. He showed up about 2:30 in the morning. Needless to say, the attendant was frantic by then.”
To forestall such callousness and institute more standardized policies among all the airlines, the U.S. Department of Transportation and the National Child Safety Council this month issued a set of guidelines and a model identification card in a pamphlet called ”Kids & Teens in Flight.”
”We just noticed that with the low air fares and the current status of American families, there would be a need for this,” said Allaire Williams, deputy director of consumer affairs for the department. ”We want to have one piece of identification that will always be with the child, no matter what airline the child is traveling on. We also want to eliminate some of the mystery of travel for children.”
Williams characterizes the current campaign as a preventive measure, rather than a response to any dire incidents. ”Nothing terrible has happened,” she said, ”but we have had a steady inflow of passenger complaints, most of them concerning children left alone upon arrival or planes rerouted and the parents not told. The complaints have been consistent and have hit all airlines equally across the board.”
Barbara Wyatt, a consultant with the National Child Safety Council, has been active in the campaign, perhaps spurred on by an unpleasant evening experienced by her 16-year-old son, Fred.
”He was dumped by an airline because of an error and got stuck in Salt Lake City,” Wyatt said. ”He didn`t know he couldn`t get a hotel room at his age, and he went to seven hotels before somebody let him in. We don`t want our kids wandering the streets.”
At O`Hare one recent Friday afternoon, half a dozen children sat around the United Airlines Aloha Room waiting for connecting flights. They were double-teamed by a dozen Unaccompanied Minor runners, young people in black and white uniforms assigned to watch over them and take them to their planes. It was not an animated scene. The children spaced themselves the way adults tend to do at boarding gate waiting areas. Most of them looked bored. One, an 8-year-old girl heading for a reunion with her father in Seattle, scowled at the cartoons blaring from the TV set. She refused to enter into conversation with anyone, and when her UM escort told her it was time to leave, she stalked off with him as if she were on her way to the principal`s office.
”They mostly sit here and watch the cartoons, the Brady Bunch and the Little Rascals, all those fine shows,” said Simone Boutet of the UM patrol. Customer service representative Barbara Baer, whose experience with flying children dates back to 1978, could recall less tranquil afternoons, however.
”I can see the change in them since my flight attendant days,” she said. ”They`re more candid and have less respect for authority. The mouths on some of them are incredible. You hear words you`d never have heard a few years ago. Sometimes, if there`s a long layover, they`ll get into fights in here. It`s almost like an uprising.”
At a similar room in Houston`s Intercontinental Airport, Cindy Allen, Continental Airlines` supervisor of airport services, presides over what Continental likes to call its Young Travelers Club. ”We have a TV, soft drinks, orange juice, games for them to play,” Allen said. ”They`re treated really well, with a lot of respect.
”The other day, a little girl came in from a flight and her ears hurt,” Allen continued. ”She was crying, and I couldn`t get her to stop. If there`s one thing I`ve found, it`s that if a child is upset or nervous or really scared about flying, and I can`t calm him down myself, I call the parents and let them talk to the child. It really does comfort them. It`s not much of an expense for the airline, and I`d rather do that than have a nervous breakdown.”
