I've had more than my share of airline travel (ten years of standby travel while married to someone in the industry will do that). Way more than my share, and in it, I may have seen it all, or quite a lot of whatever "all" is when it comes to moving about the world inside a flying bus. And what I've seen mostly is that things get screwed up. And often. Maybe not often when compared to the sheer number of flights etc that take place even within a single airport in a single day, but when it's you that's affected, it's huge. And even worse when it's your kid. Flying alone. Where there are, sad to say, fewer protections in place than we realize.

But, knowing what I know now, I wonder why parents send their kids off unaccompanied so often? Yes, I've done it, had to, when my older daugher spent summers with her dad in a another state. Waving goodbye to her, all of 8 or 9 years old and marching up the jetbridge all alone at the gate was probably the single most frightening thing I've had to do. But I couldn't afford two roundtrip tickets for myself to fly her there and back, nor could I take the time away from work to do so. So I am guessing that many parents are in a similar predicament.

And usually things go smoothly: flights are on time or close enough, luggage arrives as well, the proper people are at the other end waiting to pick the kid up.

But sometimes things go wrong.  And airlines shoulder far less responsibility than you might think. For one thing, every airline has different rules about unaccompanied minors. In some cases, any special treatment stops at age 12. My older son is about to turn 12, and even though he's also flown zillions of times, I doubt he would know what to do in a crisis of missing flights, cancelled flights, etc.

Would your kid? Sure, that's why they make cell phones, but on the other hand maybe the whole system needs to be rethought. I understand the desire on the part of the post-9/11 financially-ailing airlines to cut back on costs: it's costly to make someone available to walk a kid to his next gate or to sit with him during an unexpected delay. But hundreds of thousands of kids are flying by themselves these days in the U.S alone. Something has to change