Mother arrives at Ottawa airport to find son never made it onto flight
Genevieve Harte’s nine-year-old son Julien was supposed to land in Ottawa at 5:35 p.m. on Saturday after a trip to San Francisco to visit his father. When the passengers deplaned, Julien was nowhere to be seen. Panicked, Harte called United Airlines who told her the flight hadn’t taken off due to bad weather. That wasn’t true: the flight had taken off, just without Julien. Luckily, she soon got a call from her son who was using his pre-paid cell phone. He was still in the children’s room at Chicago O’Hare where he had switched planes en route from from San Francisco several hours earlier. It had already been more than 12 hours since he had left San Francisco and airline staff had only offered the child food from McDonald’s, which was inadequate for the young vegetarian. United Airlines put the boy on the next flight back to Ottawa and gave Harte an undisclosed “gesture of goodwill.” Julien arrived safely, if a little hungry, in Ottawa at 10 p.m.