A worrying situation
A real-life Home Alone 2 situation occurred when a six-year-old boy flew alone to the wrong US city after he was ‘incorrectly boarded’ on a Spirit Airlines plane.
Casper was travelling from Philadelphia to meet his grandmother in Fort Myers in Florida.
However, he ended up in Orlando – a four-hour drive from Fort Myers – after he was mistakenly put on the wrong plane.
Spirit Airlines apologised for the mix-up and offered to reimburse his grandmother for the drive to pick Casper up.
Casper was meant to be travelling from Philadelphia International Airport to Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers on Thursday, to meet his grandmother, Maria Ramos.
But in a scene reminiscent of the film Home Alone 2, when Kevin gets on a wrong flight – leaving him stranded far away from his family at Christmas, Casper was put on a plane to Orlando.
When the plane Casper was supposed to be on landed without Casper, his grandmother panicked.
She told WINK-TV: “I ran inside the plane to the flight attendant and I asked her, ‘Where’s my grandson? He was handed over to you at Philadelphia?'”
Fortunately, Casper managed to phone his grandmother soon after he landed in Orlando who was then able to drive from Fort Myers to pick up her grandson.
She said: “I want them to call me [and] let me know how my grandson ended up in Orlando.
“How did that happen? Did they get him off the plane? He jumped in the wrong plane by himself?”
Spirit Airlines said in a statement: “We take the safety and responsibility of transporting all of our guests seriously and are conducting an internal investigation. We apologize to the family for this experience.”
Though incidents of this nature are uncommon, there are a couple of occasions where this has happened before.
In 2009, two different unaccompanied girls were placed on wrong Continental Airlines flights within the US.
On another occasion in 2019, a boy was put on a United Airlines flight to Germany when he was supposed to be travelling to Sweden.
