Parents forget child in airport ... wtf?!?

[NotQuiteCockney]

Here. It's not horrific, but it is quite .

Heard this on radio just now . It seems the family were split in two groups at boarding, each parent was seated with some fo the children at opposite ends of the aircraft and assumed the other had the missing one . They didn't relaise until well into the flight. Don't the stewards normally do a head count though ?

since I only have one dc, this never happened to us but I should have thought they would have noticed at check-in when they had to present the tickets/passports.

O M G ! Can you imagine how sick they must have felt when they realised.
This happened when I was a child. We had visitors that came in 2 cars. When they left we had one child left over....cue mad car dash to catch-up with one of the cars. The days before mobile phones...

Hang on a sec, the girl was found in the duty free shop. Isn't that normally some distance from the departure lounge ?
So its not like the 2 parents, and the five children walked together to the departure lounge, sat, waited, and then the parents split up, when called onto the plane, one with 2 children, the other other with 2, both assuming that the other parent had the third child.
Infact the 5th child hadn't been with them at all for the last ..... few minutes/hour possibly.
Because she was still back in duty free.
That puts a slightly different slant on it. Surely ?

depends on the airport. Our local airport has duty free shops in the middle of the departure lounges themselves, sort of a large glass-fronted box in the middle of the seating

The child could have gone back to the duty free shop when she realised the rest of the family had gone - thinking that's where they had gone, especially if they had been to the shop on the way - lost children do tend to go to places they recognise & have been before.

It's all a bit odd, thank goodness she was found and sent on safely.

I am surprised the airline flew although her a passenger booked had not boarded though. Sounds a bit odd altogether, must have been an especially crowded time or something.

so which parent was holding her boarding card and her passport?

oops extra"her" in there for some reason

Does she bear a striking resemblance to Macaulay Culkin?

Hang on a sec, I've flown into and departed from this airport. Tel Aviv Airport. Its bloody huge. Duty free is miles form any departure lounge.

AND staff have a role call. So they know that mr john .... has not boarded. And they call them on the tannoy, right ?

No, sorry, the more I think about it, the more it is totally beyond me how
a) parents
b) staff
allowed this to happen.

Agreed - its one thing to accidentally forget for a minute or two that you have a child and have to go and get them. This is not a minute or two, its ages and how on earth did they not realise that the 'empty' seat next to them should have been full? What about the other kids, why didn't they speak up?

And for a country where airport security is sooooooo tight, I am really uber surprised. Unbe'fing'lievable.

They need to punish the parents don't you think???

The security at Tel Aviv is the tightest I have ever seen. And I have flown from ALOT of airports.

I am staggered.

This beggars belief.

Let's wait and hear the whole story before we start talking about 'punishing' parents. Presumably they feel absolutely distraught. Perhaps they had a crying baby, distracting them. Perhaps they were feeling emotional at emigrating or anxious about the flight.

Planes will take off if there is a passenger missing--I've nearly missed flights before now for being late. It's only if you have luggage checked in that they will necessarily not take off without you. The four year old wouldn't have had had luggage checked in in her own name.

If the announcements were not made in their native language and were pronouncing the childs name with a strong accent (and trying to hear it over the rest of their noisy brood) I can understand it.

The announcements were made after the flight had taken off.

I mean the announcments calling for the missing passenger at the end of boarding.

My parents once went out for lunch and left my niece, aged 6, behind on the farm. They drove separately and each thought the other had her, they didn't realise until they met at the restaurant.

My niece wandered about, shouted "Help" a bit, , and was dicovered by the milkman who drove her to the restaurant in his milk-float!

This was about 1990, I wonder whether the milkman would do that now?

aw wish they'd bring back milkmen and milkfloats, we don't have them here and I feel all nostalgic...

Blimey. Makes me feel like quite an organised person...