Stolen Backpack at Delta’s JFK Carousel Tracked to D.C., What Caused Friday’s FAA Ground Stop, and United’s Fake Booze Rule

Aloha from Honolulu! My wife and I are in town with some friends and family for the North Dakota State vs. Hawaii football game!

I usually open these with a story about strangers. This week, two of the people in the lead story are guys I actually know. One lost a backpack at JFK. The other chased it to Washington, D.C.

Then on Friday afternoon, the FAA stopped every departure in the country, which gave just about everyone else a travel story, too.

Let’s start with the good guys!

My colleague JT Genter and his wife, Katie, travel full-time, so when someone grabbed his backpack off the Delta baggage belt at JFK Terminal 4, it wasn’t just a bag. It was his clothes, his medication, his toiletries, and mementos he can’t replace. What JT didn’t mention at first was the Tile tracker inside it. (Pro tip: put a tracker in every checked bag. Every one.) That’s where my friend Jamie Larounis comes in. Jamie is an EMT, a blogger, a travel planner, a Disney expert, and, as of this week, a real-life superhero. He followed the signal as the man with the bag rode Amtrak from New York to D.C., spotted him at a bus station, and got the number of the bus he boarded to two Metropolitan Police officers. They arrested a suspect a few blocks away, then had Jamie ride along in the cruiser to identify him. (Jamie’s take: a D.C. police car was not on his bingo card for the day.) Nearly everything came back. The part I keep thinking about is what Jamie didn’t do, and why it was exactly right. Matthew Klint has the whole chase, plus how JT feels about Delta’s response, over at Live and Let’s Fly.

Then came Friday. The FAA halted departures to, from, and within the U.S. for up to four hours, and Simple Flying reports more than 10,000 flights were canceled, with the fallout expected to run through the weekend while airlines dig crews and planes out of the wrong cities. It wasn’t a hack. (Officials said there was no sign of a cyberattack.) It was a contractor, L3Harris, swapping an aging copper telecom line for fiber at a remote FAA site when a router started flooding the air traffic control network. Radio and radar feeds were disrupted at 17 of the 22 en route centers. The routers involved are reportedly about 25 years old. (Yes, older than the iPhone.) If you’re flying this weekend, check your airline’s app before you leave for the airport. The detail that jumped out at me: this isn’t the first time a fiber swap has done something like this. Here’s what broke, and the 2009 failure that sounds awfully familiar.

Among the people stuck on the ground: the UNLV football team. Friday is travel day for most college teams playing on Saturday, and the Rebels’ charter to Albuquerque couldn’t leave Las Vegas. They finally flew out Friday night, and Saturday’s game against No. 23 New Mexico is still on for 4:30 p.m. Pacific. Nothing says pregame routine like an hours-long flight delay. And they weren’t the only team scrambling. Here’s how the Rebels’ travel day unraveled. In a related-ish story, my NDSU Bison were stranded for about 12 hours in Fargo because Eastern Airlines (yes, Eastern Airlines) had plane problems and couldn’t get the soon-to-be Mountain West champions to Hawaii until the middle of the night on Friday morning.

Elsewhere, a United passenger flying to San Juan for a birthday weekend ordered a drink on a four-hour Saturday evening flight and was told no, because they were sitting in the exit row. Their Reddit post called it a “bad time to learn that alcohol is not served in exit rows.” Except it isn’t. United has no such policy, and neither the FAA nor the DOT bans exit row passengers from drinking. It also would have been the passenger’s first drink of the day. After a complaint, United apologized and handed over 5,000 miles. Here’s how a made-up rule turned into a few free MileagePlus miles, and what other frequent flyers had to say about it.

I hate it when airline employees introduce their own rules, partly because it happened to me. Back in 2019, my wife and I were at the top of the upgrade list on a Minneapolis to Los Angeles flight with our infant daughter, and a Delta gate agent told me he had never upgraded someone traveling with a child. That wasn’t a Delta policy, either. A supervisor confirmed he was making up his own rules, and Delta credited 20,000 miles to each of our SkyMiles accounts. By my math, that United passenger got shortchanged by 35,000 miles. 😉 Here’s how that gate agent’s personal policy played out.

And if you missed it in October, Delta’s September quarter numbers are a reminder that the airline with its own oil refinery is doing just fine. Delta reported record adjusted revenue of $17.6 billion, up 16% from last year, and adjusted earnings of $1.72 a share. Pre-tax profit matched last year even as fuel costs climbed. It did trim its full-year earnings outlook to $5.10 to $5.60 a share (down from $6.50 to $7.50 in July), and it expects December quarter revenue to grow about 20%. Ed Bastian says demand is strong because people keep choosing experiences and travel. My read: if you’re waiting for Delta fares to come down, get comfortable. Delta’s full September quarter release is here, including the size of this year’s fuel bill.

Have you ever had an airline employee invent a rule on the spot? Or tracked down a lost (or stolen) bag yourself? I want to hear how it ended.

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