Usually Spirit Airlines is in the news because of the fights that passengers manage to get into, so the positive ending for this story is a nice change of pace…
A Spirit Airlines flight diverted due to a medical emergency
On June 30, 2020, Spirit Airlines flight 3216 was scheduled to fly from San Juan to Philadelphia. A young girl on the flight had a medical emergency, so the plane diverted to Providenciales, Turks & Caicos, so that she could receive medical treatment.
The young girl and her parents were taken off the flight and brought to a hospital there, where she recovered quickly.
At that point there was just a slight problem — not only did the family not have passports, but apparently the airport was still closed to commercial service otherwise, so the family had no way to leave the island.
Spirit Airlines comes to the rescue
Knowing about the situation, on July 1 Spirit Airlines sent a plane to Providenciales to fly the family back to San Juan. Yep, the family had the plane all to themselves, as this was otherwise not a scheduled flight.
The family even got to sit in Big Front Seats — no word on whether they were charged for carry-ons or packaged snacks. 😉
Spirit Airlines even made a big deal of it, and had staff greeting them in San Juan, and sent someone along to film the whole thing.
❤️ @SpiritAirlines went back to get a family in Turks & Caicos that Spirit left there due to a medical emergency. The family was flying from San Juan to Philly but landed in T&C with out a passport. Due to COVID there’s no air service out of T&C, so Spirt took them home to PR. pic.twitter.com/4Y0YX65CkO
— David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) July 5, 2020
Bottom line
While Spirit Airlines clearly used this as a bit of a PR opportunity, all the more power to them. The airline diverted to Turks & Caicos to begin with (which was costly), and then even picked up the family to fly them back home when there was no commercial service.
It’s always nice to see airlines do the right thing…
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