It takes a village
Posted by Dalton48 on 19 Dec 2007 at 08:11 am | Tagged as: Business, Current Events
Perhaps it’s because I’m a non-parent, and/or because I’m the child of an immigrant mother so enthralled by her chosen home of Canada that she believed Canadians incapable of all ill, leaving her kids to fend for themselves on buses, subways, and trans-border flights to grandparents in the statistically more perilous 70s, but shouldn’t the narrative of the story about the little girl who walked off a Westjet flight with a helpful seatmate who delivered her to her parents be something more along the lines of “At Christmas time, a little girl makes a new friend on her first flight as an unaccompanied minor”?
I’ve talked to little UMs next to me on flights, helped them open the plastic containers holding their lunch, stopped them from kicking the seat in front of them, asked them where they were going, taken a look to make sure they were matched up with their relatives later. Should I not be doing these things? Under the constant, if not always close, gaze of a flight attendant, striking up conversation with a chatty child seems benign enough.
How did this became a front-page story, carried in several major papers? Did the father call the media? Or was it the good samaritan:
Mr. Cataford told local media that the flight crew ignored the child, so he helped Sara-Maude off the plane, packing up the girl’s toys and helping her into her coat.
Normally the little girl would have stayed on the plane while other passengers deplaned. So is it that the flight crew “ignored” her, or that the man was getting ready to get off the plane and thought she should be getting ready too? Cataford could have led the girl to a flight attendant, or pushed the call button to summon one, but instead he led her off the plane past the crew. That could only have been to prove a point, which makes his motives more suspect than anyone else’s.
Apparently the five-year-old was confused by the flight experience and:
During a stopover in Winnipeg she almost got off the plane, thinking she had arrived. Fortunately, a fellow passenger had asked her where she was going.
Doesn’t this show that society works? Five-year-old starts to follow the crowd, not yet at the jetway door, stranger passing by notices, speaks to child, probably alerts flight attendant.
Is it that these parents, and all of us, have such low expectations of our fellow citizens that we find any gestures of care for young, confused-looking children extraordinary, rather than part of normal human behaviour?
Westjet may have been negligent — I couldn’t say. But based on the story published in newspapers, full of the claims of “good samaritan” Caraford, neither can you.
And in the meantime, the sinister tone in a story about a five-year-old who successfully and safely made her way from A to B seems misplaced.
Cataford, who comes across as a self-important busybody (or maybe just naive and with a poor sense of boundaries), was way out of line. On the other hand, the girl’s father correctly identified Westjet’s failure:
“He managed to walk right out of the plane with her,” Mr. Boissy said. “It’s deplorable, unacceptable and negligent … and I want to know how this was allowed to happen.”
There’s a huge distance between being friendly and helpful to a child and actually leading her off an aircraft without referring to the cabin crew who are supposed to be responsible for her.
I agree — I can only think this guy was trying to make a point by taking her off the airplane. (I also think it likely that the Westjet people were liklely less suspicious about a little girl leaving me a dad-like guy than by herself — they may want to look into that in their training.)
This seemed to me to be a pathetic scrap of non-news: one child (out of how many thousands who are UMS at this time of year) had no harm done to her for a 100 metre walk down a gangplank.
Frankly, my other opinion on this is that our friend Mr. Cataford put himself into potentially serious legal jeopardy by taking her off the plane (however innocently meant). A zealous cop could spin that into child abduction, I’m pretty sure. Now, I don’t think that’s a good thing, but if my husband were moved to “help” in this way, I’d probably tell him that having a word with a flight attendant was a better way to handle the situation.
I’m surprised that airlines still allow children that young to fly unaccompanied. I think I read recently that they were getting much more skittish about it and, at least, raising the minimum age significantly (there’s obviously a huge difference between an unaccompanied 5-year-old and a 10-year-old…) It wouldn’t surprise me if Canadian airlines were more permissive than US at this point.
[...] I have some questions: if the bus stopped at the house every morning, why didn’t it occur to the parents that their little boy might have got on it? Where was their other son — the one who takes the bus every day — that morning? Why does every article about a missing (or temporarily AWOL child) think it’s important we know he/she is “blond haired, blue eyed”? And — now that I think about it– why can’t I recall ever reading a story like this about a brown-haired, brown-eyed tot? Why the constant amazement at children having misadventures that result in no harm? [...]