Jet Blues

As if the airlines didn’t have enough bad news, today we learn how American Airlines lost a human body, United’s stock tanked from a newspaper misprint, and JetBlue resorted to eBay to auction off airline tickets.

Actually, when I heard that last piece of news, I actually gave JetBlue some credit for some out of the box thinking. But then I was reminded of that Trojan Horse propagandist Palin who purportedly sold the Alaskan state-owned jet on eBay as an example of her faux-reformer ways.

Consumerist picks up on a NY Post piece about an Ecuadorian man whose wife died of cancer in New York. He arranged to have her body shipped back to Guayaquil, but AA proceeded to lose the body. When it finally showed up four days later, unrefrigerated and in an unrecognizable state of decomposition, the husband was forced to dispense with the open casket. “A spokeswoman for the airline said the company could not comment on pending litigation.” I bet.

United, on the other hand, fell victim to a misprint in the South Florida Sun Sentinel reporting the airlines’ bankruptcy. Bloomberg picked up on the report, setting off an Internet frenzy, via the aggregated Google and Yahoo! Newses, that tanked the stock price by 75% and led to a halt in trading. Small detail: the story was six years old. Someone at the Tribune-owned paper put the wrong dateline on it.

The same can’t be said for that once high-flying stock, Lehman Brothers