Highly Disturbing
My wonderous 12 year old daughter was in NH for a visit with her grandparents, and I was scheduled to go pick her up yesterday. Due to a really rotten head cold, I cancelled my trip, and then I talked to the Independence Air representative about making sure that child was ok as an unaccompanied minor on her way back. I was assured that the flight attendants would take her off the plane and keep her at the gate for me to go get her.
So I arrived at the gate, and there was a line to board the next aircraft. There were no humans around to talk to. I looked around, saw no child, and then had to search to find an employee. While it's great that so much of the Independence Air procedures are dealt with by touch screens and easy Internet check ins, once you need an employee, they're pretty tough to find. The employee was helping two people ahead of me, one of whom was very dense, despite his nice clothing, and had to be spoon fed what to do next. By the time I got to speak to the human, he said he'd sent an unaccompanied child to customer service at the end of the hall. He tried to call them, but they wouldn't answer the phone. I asked "the one up there?" pointing to the right. He said yes. So off I went down the hall.
When I got to the customer service desk indicated, it wasn't Independence Air's, and I was directed back down the other end of the terminal (i.e. I should have turned left, not right). As I was going back down there, I found child, wandering around the terminal unaccompanied.
Ok folks, my daughter is 12 years old. Little girls wandering around major airport terminals by themselves is something I find highly disturbing. She told me that no flight attendant had given her any help whatsoever, and she was allowed to deplane with everyone else, and given no direction on what to do next, such as "wait at the gate for your mother."
In addition, the way that I wound up at the gate at the first place was rather interesting. I went to the Independence Air counter and said that I wanted to pick up an unaccompanied child. The person asked the name, looked child up in the database to make sure she was a passenger, then called someone else, and spelled my name out for them. Then I was given a piece of xeroxed paper that was supposed to be my pass, with my name printed on it in pen, along with the reservation number.
So why is this interesting? Everyone else had a printed boarding pass that is relatively difficult to forge. I had a piece of paper, easily created by anyone. Name filled in, a random series of letters and numbers put on it, and then I would have access to the gates.
My conclusion here is that once again, annoying security is useless, and so easily circumvented. People who used to go to the gates to pick up their loved ones, are no longer allowed to for no real good reason, since the real bad guys can just print out a bogus pass on a piece of paper, and as long as the penned in name matches your photo ID, you're in. However, the important security of making sure that a 12 year old child is safe as an unaccompanied minor is ignored. That's security for you.