Travel Trauma

Memo to the BlackBerry and laptop brigade: Think “you’ve” got it rough this plane awful summer of record passenger counts and rippling delays?

Try grappling with canceled flights, overflowing lavatories and serpentine security lines with a squirming toddler in tow.

“I’d rather be in a stagecoach crossing the Rocky Mountains, worrying about Indian attacks and other unknown dangers, than be a family in the aviation system today,” declares Kevin Mitchell, father of one and chairman of the Business Travel Coalition, a group representing corporate travel buyers.

“Many of these people are once-a-year travelers who are clueless about what they’re getting into,” Mitchell says. And thanks to a combination of rising airline load factors, stressed-out employees and an antiquated air-traffic control system, “all of this is only going to get worse.”

That would be bad news, indeed, for parents like Kate Penland.

The suburban Atlanta mother and her 19-month-old son, Garren, already were delayed more than 10 hours when they boarded – and were booted off – a Continental Express flight operated by ExpressJet in Houston last month. Penland, who told her story on local and national television last week, says she was kicked off when she refused a flight attendant’s request to medicate her son with “baby Benadryl” to get him to stop saying “bye-bye, plane!”

ExpressJet says it’s still investigating the incident, which has lit up the blogosphere with responses from sympathetic parents and irate business fliers, many calling for a segregated family section on airplanes.

It’s not the only high-profile example of familial turbulence in the skies and airports: This winter, after ejecting a 3-year-old and her parents from a flight when the child refused to sit still and buckle her seat belt, AirTran received about 14,000 calls and e-mail messages – the overwhelming majority supporting the airline’s action.

Last month, a Washington, D.C., blog posted an account of a local woman who said she was mistreated by Transportation Security Administration officials when she spilled water from her toddler’s sippy cup after being told she couldn’t take the water through security at Washington’s Reagan National airport.

The TSA fought back, posting security video footage and an incident report on the “Myth Buster” section of its website, along with a challenge to “decide for yourself.”

And this month, Delta came under fire when a 15-year-old and his 10-year-old sister, traveling alone, were stranded overnight after a missed connection at the Salt Lake City airport. The children’s parents reportedly hadn’t paid the extra “unaccompanied minor” fees that would have ensured supervision and had booked a tight 28-minute connection late in the day.

This summer’s crowded planes (a projected record 209 million U.S. passengers will fly between June and August) and frequent delays (tracking service FlightStats.com says more than 30 percent of the most popular U.S. airline flights arrived late in June, with an average delay of 62 minutes) make such horror stories more likely, Kate Penni says. The Calfornia real estate agent has been crusading for passenger rights since she and her family were trapped on a grounded American Airlines plane in Austin in December for nine hours. Among the items in a “stranded passenger survival kit” she plans to sell on her Web site, www.flyersrights.com: earplugs, air freshener and instructions on how to make a diaper out of a T-shirt.

“Delays are one thing, but I think fliers, especially those with kids, feel like they’re up against the wall,” says TakingtheKids.com columnist Eileen Ogintz, who recently found herself stranded for five hours on an Air France flight after her plane landed at JFK airport but couldn’t get to a gate.

“There’s really something different this summer. Not only can’t you count on the airlines giving you anything to eat, but you can’t count on a three-hour flight actually” being “a three-hour flight. It’s a whole new paradigm.”