TAMPA, Fla. — It’s the panic no parent hopes to experience when sending their child off on vacation, but a Tampa Bay Area family went through just that when their 16-year-old son ended up hundreds of miles from his intended destination.
“He has flown with us many times before, but his first time flying alone," said Ryan Lose.
The Friday before Christmas, Lose's 16-year-old son, Logan, was set to fly from Tampa International Airport to Cleveland on a Frontier Airlines flight to visit his mom for the holidays. Lose said Logan noticed passengers at his gate boarding, so he joined them.
“He goes up to the gate attendant, they check his personal item in the little slot, and then they look at his phone, which has the boarding pass," said Lose. "They don’t ever scan it and set it down and scan it, which would’ve just alerted them to say, 'Hey, this is not the right flight.'”
But Logan was instead about to head in the opposite direction of Cleveland.
“Exactly like Home Alone 2, where Kevin puts on the music and the flight attendants start talking about where they're going, and he can't hear anything, that's exactly what happened with Logan," said Lose.
It turned out it was the wrong flight, and Logan landed in Puerto Rico.
"If he would've landed in another state, I could've just got in a car and drove, had him on the phone, and say, 'Hey Logan, just don't do anything, just stay there, I'll be there in X amount of hours,'" said Lose. "I can't do that when he's in Puerto Rico.”
Frontier allows children 15 and older to fly alone but doesn't offer an unaccompanied minor program involving airline-provided escorts for minors.
Frontier told ABC Action News both the San Juan and Cleveland flights left from the same gate, with the San Juan flight departing first.
In a statement about the situation, the airline said, "He was immediately flown back to Tampa on the same aircraft and accommodated on a flight to Cleveland the following day. Frontier has extended its sincere apologies to the family for the error.”
The airline hasn't responded back yet as to how this could've happened.
"At this point, maybe I'm debating: Do I take a plane up to Cleveland, meet him there, so I can fly back down with him? His mom says that she's going to get a gate pass and be able to walk him up to the gate to make sure he gets on the correct flight," said Lose. "So there's a couple of different scenarios that we're playing with to see, to make sure we can keep Logan as safe and calm as possible to bring him home."
