Delta puts unattended kids on wrong flights

MINNEAPOLIS — Two children, including a 9-year-old from Spokane, traveling on Delta as unaccompanied minors were put on the wrong connecting flights and ended up far from where they intended to travel, an airline official said Wednesday.

The mix-up Tuesday at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where the children had connecting flights, was blamed by Delta spokesman Paul Skrbec on a "paperwork swap," sending the boy to Cleveland rather than Boston, and a girl to Boston rather than Cleveland.

The children were "under airline supervision at all times," Skrbec said. "We immediately contacted their guardians that they were rerouted," arriving at their destinations many hours than originally scheduled.

Delta apologized to the families, issued refunds, completed their travels at no extra cost and gave them credit for future flights, Skrbec said.

Skrbec said that such mix-ups with unaccompanied minors are "exceedingly rare. It's certainly something that we take very seriously."

WOIO-TV in Cleveland reported that the boy from Spokane, 9-year-old Kieren Krenshaw, said, "It was just weird. I was like, I'm supposed to be at Boston not Cleveland."

The boy was flying from Spokane to Boston to visit his grandparents, the TV station said.

"We're paying them to check on him and be with him," the WOIO station quoted Krenshaw's grandfather, Larry Kershaw, as saying. "They just threw him in the plane like anyone else ... didn't even ask his name to match the paperwork."