United Airlines: A Dying Mom, and the Unkindness of Strangers

I missed this story last year — it is a bit dated now, some 10-11 months after the fact, but I’m going to post the story today, in its entirety because quite frankly, it made me sick to the pit of my stomach. This was reported first in The Consumerist, and picked up later by Shashank Nigam in his excellent blog, SimpliFlying:

A United Airlines customer with Premier status (“Mike”) was assisting his girlfriend with an urgent flight from San Francisco to Portland because the woman’s mom was dying. Some of you already know where this is heading, so I won’t editorialize here; I’ll let the man’s letter to United CEO Glenn Tilton speak for itself:
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