TRAVELERS’ CHECK : Fliers find right name, wrong city
Posted on Monday, July 21, 2008
An editor in Little Rock years ago suggested more columns about the good deeds of motorists and travelers.
There’s no time like the present to write the first one.
It’s about Miriam Gonzalez and David Ibarra.
Gonzalez, a Springdale resident originally from El Salvador, and Ibarra, a Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport police officer from Mexico, stepped up when a Mexican couple needed help.
Gonzalez was at XNA when she met Carlos Olguin Romero and his wife, Eufemia Garcia. The couple had arrived on a Continental Airlines flight, starting their journey in Mexico City. It was around noon July 4 and they told her that a nephew from Fayetteville would be along shortly to pick them up.
Gonzalez offered her phone number to them, saying she’d help them if they needed anything while they were in town.
The couple was still waiting at XNA at 4 p.m. when Ibarra met them. They said their nephew was coming from Fayetteville, Carolina del Norte, to pick them up.
Ibarra broke the bad news: You’re in Arkansas. He learned within a few minutes that flying to North Carolina would cost $ 1, 000 per ticket. The couple had $ 60.
Ibarra took the couple to dinner and contacted Gonzalez.
“If that was my family, and they do travel from Mexico to here, I would hope airport administration would help in the same way,” Ibarra said.
They spent the night with Gonzalez and her husband, Carlos Ramos. Gonzalez also came up with $ 351 for the couple’s 33-hour Greyhound bus ride to the correct Fayetteville.
“Today it was them, maybe tomorrow it will be me,” Gonzalez told Francisco Ayala, the editor of Noticias Libres, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Inc. ’s Spanish-language newspaper. “You never know when you will need help.” The couple planned to make the trip home by bus long before their plane issues.
“We found very kind people like officer Ibarra and the Ramos family,” Romero told Ayala. “We already sent them a money order to pay back the bus tickets.” These sorts of mistakes are infrequent, but they do occur in Fayettevilles, Greenvilles and Springfields. Language isn’t always the issue, either.
Ibarra, who has worked at the airport for 18 months, knows of two other times when Hispanics flew to XNA by mistake instead of Fayetteville, N. C.
A few times a year, Army recruits bound for boot camp at Fort Bragg, N. C., wandered into the terminal at Drake Field, the airport in Fayetteville that had the region’s airline service before it moved to XNA.
American Airlines brags on a flight attendant who on Christmas Eve drove a woman six hours after she bought a plane ticket to Greenville, N. C., instead of Greenville, S. C.
The Springfield, Mo., airport once got a passenger intending to be in Illinois and that same day a Missouribound puppy shipped by plane arrived in Illinois, said Mark Hanna, director of the Abraham Lincoln Capital Airport in Springfield, Ill.
American Airlines employees met in St. Louis in a passenger-for-puppy trade. There’s been no word on who got the better end of the swap, but The Guru’s sure he knows.
By all accounts, the puppy was cute. Robert J. Smith’s column about people on the move in Northwest Arkansas appears each Monday. He can be reached at rsmith@arkansasonline. com.
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