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For the second time this month, an airline "lost" a passenger.
This time it was Southwest Airlines, as a Denver family complained that the carrier failed to take their 85-year old wheelchair-bound mother from curbside check-in to the gate - and that the woman was forced to sit at Newark Liberty International Airport for hours until somebody realized the mistake.
Donna Vaticano says she took her mother, Alice Vaticano, to Newark for a flight bound for Denver recently but, because Donna was unticketed, she could not advance past security. She said a skycap told her she would wheel her mother to the gate for the flight.
But Donna Vaticano said her mother was "parked" and sat unattended for hours. No one was made aware of the problem, she said, until Donna's sister in Denver, who was awaiting Alice's arrival, realized their mother was not on the flight and began making frantic phonecalls.
"Where was she?" Donna Vaticano told CBS4 in Denver. "What happened to her? These are people's jobs. Who is supposed to be paying attention?"
Southwest Airlines officials put Alice Vaticano on a connecting flight through Chicago to Denver. The carrier released the following statement regarding the incident: "We've researched the details of this Denver customer's travel and can verify that she checked in for her flight at Newark Liberty International Airport two hours prior to her scheduled departure, but a processing error in that check-in process did not alert our employees at the gate to her special need (wheelchair) in boarding the aircraft."
It's the second time this month this has happened. Annie and Perry Klebahn complained that their daughter Phoebe was left unattended while flying on United Airlines from San Francisco to a camp Traverse City, Mich., via a stopover and change of flights in Chicago. Phoebe did not make the Chicago flight, and the family didn't realize it until the camp called to say she hadn't arrived.
She was "found" and placed on a flight from Chicago to Traverse City four hours after the original flight.
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