Replies

The only thing that’s going to stop all the disinformation is for the public to stand up for the truth. Call the airlines. Air Tran’s PR number is 678 254-7441 and tell them you’re tired of the lies and the shifting of blame for the incident off the perpetrators and onto passengers who choose to tell their story, however exagerated it might be. Air Tran owes it to their customers to issue a new statement explaining the incident, without singling out one passenger, calling him a liar, whether he was on the plane or not. They should not have covered up the realities on Nov. 18 and now they are going to pay a price. Bad PR man.

There are some MAJOR problems with this story.

In Petruna’s email he says:
“Due to the amount of people who got off that flight, it was cancelled. I was supposed to be in Houston at 6pm. I got here at 12:30am. Look up the date. Flight 297, Atlanta to Houston. “

So, I DID look it up.

Checking on www.flightstats.com shows that, indeed, FL 205 arrived at the gate in Atlanta at 5:06pm. That same site shows 297 was scheduled for departure at 4:43pm and actual departure was 7:08. I cannot confirm at that site whether the flight left the gate at 4:43 and returned, but that is what ALL accounts say, including Petruna.

Note he says the flight “was cancelled”; FAA records above show that it was NOT cancelled and arrived in Houston at 8:42pm. The flight duration is 2hr34min (scheduled), so that means that FLIGHT 297 ARRIVED IN HOUSTON BEFORE PETRUNA LEFT ATLANTA (arriving at 12:30am as he says)!

Interestingly, AirTran’s final flight of the day from ATL to HOU landed, on time, at 10:14pm. In other words, there was no AirTran flight that got into Houston after 10:14pm that day. He couldn’t have landed at 12:30am, or within 2 hours of that time.

How could a “first hand witness” have so many factual errors?

Another problem: Petruna says he “has the boarding pass”. He was probably issued the connecting boarding pass in Akron-Canton, thus it doesn’t show whether he was on the flight or not. We’ve all ended up with unused boarding passes when we miss a connection.

What would be much better “proof” is if he has a boarding pass from Akron-Canton to Atlanta on a flight OTHER THAN FLIGHT 205, which is documented to have landed after this incident took place. He could ONLY have witnessed this incident if he took a flight EARLIER than FL 205, which AirTran says he was on.