Frontier Customer Service Faults Passenger For Not Taking Bags With Her During Emergency Evacuation After Plane Strikes Pedestrian On Runway

If you've been told this once, you've been told it 100 times: when you're evacuating a plane in an emergency situation, leave all carry-on items behind. Apparently, a Frontier customer service agent didn't get that memo following the horrific incident on Friday night when a person was struck and killed by Frontier flight 4345 during takeoff in Denver.

Chloe Kuns, a mother and teacher who was sitting in seat 5C for the flight to Los Angeles, posted on the r/Aviation Subreddit about her experience during the ordeal and what happened in the days following when she reached out to Frontier's customer service team. Jalopnik reached out to Kuns and was able to verify that her story was legit. She says that because she was one of the only passengers who didn't reach into the overhead bins for her carry-on luggage (videos online show people evacuating with their luggage), she — and her infant daughter, who was sleeping on her lap at the time of the crash — were among the few people on the ground who didn't have any of their necessities.

Since she hadn't heard anything from Frontier about getting personal items left on the plane back, Kuns reached out to the airline in an effort to retrieve things like her keys, wallet, ID, diaper bag, medication and child's car seat. That won't happen until May 12, at the earliest, Kuns says, so she decided to buy a new car seat, baby essentials and phone charger in the meantime.

In any case, Kuns and her daughter were automatically rebooked on a 6 a.m. flight from Denver to LA on May 9, she tells Jalopnik. That flight went off without a hitch, but things turned sour before she was due to fly out of LA back to her home in Michigan on May 11. Simply, she couldn't do it. After all, her ID is still on the plane, and you can't fly without ID. Because of that, she's gotta wait in LA until her bags show up.

Kuns needed to speak with a customer service representative about moving her return flight until after she was reunited with her belongings, and that's when stuff got really nasty. She wrote that she spoke with "9 different customer service agents and supervisors," looking to get some sort of resolution to her problem, admitting to being a bit of a "pain in the butt," but the alleged response she got from one of them was pretty damn shocking:

"[A]n agent told me it was my fault I didn't take my personal items with me off the emergency slide (as I was directed), and had to really fight to not be charged hundreds of dollars for a new flight home once we get our things.

The customer service agent hasn't been identified, and Jalopnik has reached out to both Frontier and the NTSB for comment on the matter, but so far, we have not heard back.

Kuns knows that it's not Frontier's fault she can't get her things back yet, since the plane is under the NTSB's care at this point, but a comment like that is just irresponsible.

Kuns wrote that she spoke on the phone with this agent for an entire hour (out of four total) on May 10. They said that because she booked the flight with a Frontier GoWild Pass — a program that lets customers pay a monthly, seasonal or annual subscription to take an unlimited number of Frontier flights (with a bunch of restrictions, of course) — she would only be able to rebook her flight from LA to Michigan on a GoWild-specific flight. Because the system is overloaded right now, between this mess and Spirit shutting down, her travel home would take between 20 and 24 hours with connections.

The customer service agent told Kuns the best she could do was refund her the $15 she technically paid for one leg of the trip, and then she could rebook a new seat at full price. If Kuns "refused" to accept that offer, the agent threatened to document it so she wouldn't be able to receive further help from Frontier.

Kun's issues started pretty much from the second she got off that Airbus A321Neo. Since she did the right thing and didn't pull her luggage from the overhead compartment, she struggled to find adequate supplies for her baby on the weekend of her first-ever Mother's Day.

"While my fellow passengers were passing time on their computers, charging their phones, changing into clean clothes, etc, my daughter and I had to fight to receive diapers, wipes, and formula in the airport while we waited for updates. She had to sit in a dirty diaper for hours as the Denver crew searched the airport, and ended up finding a few old looking diapers that we used," Kuns wrote on Reddit. "It took longer to get wipes, formula, and we never got a baby bottle, though they found us an old sippy cup we washed and used."

She also mentioned a Type 1 diabetic passenger who left behind their insulin, and EMTs didn't have any on hand to give her.

Overall, Kuns said she was "truly shocked" by Frontier's alleged lack of emergency preparedness, asserting that it felt as if the company had never considered "the logistics of a situation like this." She added that not having a care plan for an infant or life-saving medication, such as insulin on a standby, seemed like a "giant error" that could have made a bad situation even worse.

There was at least one bright spot for Kuns during this entire mess: the ground staff at the Denver International Airport. She said they did everything in their power to make life a little easier for her and the other passengers, running around the massive airport to find essentials that were needed. They also made sure passengers had plenty of water and snacks while everything was being sorted. It's nice to know there's at least a bit of humanity and goodwill out there.

We'll be sure to update this story when and if Frontier or the NTSB gets back to us with a statement, or if Kuns hears anything else on her end.