Another episode of greedy behaviour from United Airlines left a Hawaiian mother having to hold her 2 year-old son in her lap for the entire three hour flight, despite paying nearly $1,000 for his seat.
This latest money grabbing incident happened last week when the airline sold her son’s seat to a standby passenger on the last leg of their trip from Honolulu to Boston.
"We had both our tickets scanned, we both went on board no problem," Shirley Yamauchi, told local TV station. Then a man approached them and showed he had the same seat number, 24A, as the boy.
"It was very shocking. I was confused. I told him, 'I bought both of these seats.'" The flight attendant came by, shrugs and says 'flight’s full,'" dismissively, they couldn't give a damn.
Shirley Yamauchi didn't want to make a scene, she remembered recent incidents on United such as the Kentucky doctor, David Dao, who was violently dragged off his flight in April. "I'm scared. I'm worried. I'm traveling with an infant. I didn't want to get hurt. I didn't want either of us to get hurt," she said in real fear of violence at the hands of United staff.
Instead, she sat with her son Taizo on her lap — or with him standing between her legs — for the entire flight. "I had him in all these contorted sleeping positions,” she told KITV. “In the end, very sadly, he was standing up between my knees."
Guidelines on the FAA’s website strongly advise against a child sitting on someone's lap: "Your arms aren't capable of holding your child securely, especially during unexpected turbulence." Industry regulations stipulate that a child of two years must occupy their own seat and cannot be carried on the lap of someone else.
"What happened to my son was unsafe, uncomfortable and unfair," Yamauchi said.
United Airlines said the seat-reselling error occurred after agents inaccurately scanned the boarding pass for Yamauchi’s son. “As a result, her son’s seat appeared to be not checked in, and staff released his seat to another customer," the airline said in a statement. However industry figures say this would have been impossible as Shirley's son already had a boarding pass, with seat number assigned at the airport and not online. The United Airlines airport systems would have to be manually overridden in order to sell the same seat again.