Air Travel and the dilemma of the "unaccompanied minor"

Dealing with "unaccompanied minors" ("UM") is a challenge for even the best of modern airlines.  For airlines struggling to enter more modern times, like British Airways, it's quite the daunting challenge.

It appears that either BA regulations or their cabin crews live in another age of the world:

While on a British Airways flight, Mirko Fischer made the ultimate air travel sacrifice: He switched seats with his wife so that she could enjoy the window seat. The flight crew wasn't having any of it, though, and promptly ordered him to move back to his original seat. Why in earth's atmosphere would someone punish such a display of seatly selflessness, you might ask? The swap landed him next to a boy flying by himself, and Fischer is a man. The airline strictly bans men from sitting next to unaccompanied minors -- because men are dangerous.

Ouch. On just how many levels is this wrong?

I don't encounter a lot of UAs on my flights on Delta Air Lines, but one sees them all the time on Southwest. One would assume that's a pricing issue. Delta reserves the "bulkhead" row of coach, that first row just after the partition separating coach from first class, for special-needs passengers. That's where they'll seat grandma when she needs wheelchair assistance to board, etc. They also put UMs in this row. If DL has any policy about who they will or will not seat next to a UM, they can easily control it.

Until passengers want to switch, that is. In the BA case, the problem was a couple separated, she in a middle-seat next to a UM and he in a window-seat in a different row. A quick-thinking flight attendant should have been able to shuffle things around a bit, re-locating someone so the couple could sit together.

Of course, that still fails to address the ridiculous policy and assumption that Penis-Americans should be automatically considered dangerous and a threat to a UM. As Broadsheet points out, statistics don't support such a policy, and the humiliation BA subjected this passenger to was just not worth the bother.

To the passenger's credit, he took the high road:

Fischer started raising hell and got British Airways to agree on an out-of-court settlement totaling £2,911. Here's the best part: He donated it all -- plus £2,000 of his own money -- to child protection organizations. Well played, sir!

Hopefully airlines will learn from this fiasco make some changes.