Twitter To The Rescue For Hungry Band Students Stranded In Airport
DETROIT (WWJ) - You could say social media helped feed some stranded Livonia band students.
WWJ's Laura Bonnell tells us their flight home from Florida was delayed at a layover in Philadelphia and hunger set in:
Fifty students in the Wind Ensemble at Churchill High School performed at Disney World, got on a plane Monday and found themselves stranded in Philly because American Airlines told the group -- after sitting on the plane for an hour -- they had to get off because the pilot was over his hours.
Band director Elizabeth Hering says the airline gave her just one food voucher and when she asked for more, she was told to write a letter. So she went to Twitter.
"Once I put it on that and had kids start re-tweeting, it was literally 15, 20 minutes before American Airlines contacted us," she said. Once they responded, we were very well taken care of. They provided us with plenty of lunch vouchers."
Hering says she was proud with how her students took a stressful situation and turned it around.
Sleeping on the airport benches and floors while the airline scheduled another crew ... which took more than 20 hours to do, she said the students took the situation in stride.
"We had been given so many meal vouchers by the end of the day that several of the kids went out and bought six dozen donuts and they passing them out to passengers who looked tired and haggard, they gave some to the flight crew too," she said.
Hering is back at work today and most of the exhausted students are too.