Frank Parlato
United Airlines is a company that exists to make money.
Individuals with serious illnesses, such as cancer, may wish to exercise caution when selecting United. Those with compromised health could face significant risks.
Consider the climate of illness, the fragile ecosystem of the human body at war with itself. Then place that body into the cold, pressurized metal tube of a United Airlines aircraft. It is a juxtaposition of vulnerabilities.
The passenger, a collection of delicate, failing systems, and the corporation, an entity of procedure. To fly while healthy is one matter; it is a transaction. To fly while ill is to invite a confrontation with a machine that does not see a person, only a problem.
And the outcome can be graver than any prognosis.
You think you’re just buying a ticket from point A to point B. But if you’ve got cancer, that ticket comes with fine print you can’t read. I’m not saying United is full of bad people. Probably some good folks work there. But the whole thing—the big machine of it—isn’t built for the fragile, for the breakable.
Petra Smeltzer Starke is a lawyer, author, and brand ambassador with a distinguished record in international business, trade, and diplomacy. She graduated at the top of her class from both undergraduate and graduate programs at the Prague School of Economics before attending Georgetown University Law Center, where she again finished first. She later practiced at O’Melveny & Myers LLP, representing political appointees and nominees during the Bush administration. Later, she joined the White House counsel’s office under President Obama.
Petra Smeltzer Starke was no ordinary lawyer. She knew the machinery from the inside, and she knew how it worked.
When Petra arrived at Los Cabos International Airport on August 10, she was also a cancer patient with a reserved first-class seat and arranged wheelchair assistance.
She was en route to Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York for critical medical tests.
The flight — a direct United Airlines departure to Newark — was one she had taken before. The same path through the terminal. To the airline whose slogan promised to fly the friendly skies.
But on this day, a corporation with policies and no soul decided she didn’t belong on the plane. She thought she was just catching a flight. Instead, she was left stranded in Mexico because United refused to let her fly despite a first-class ticket and proper documentation.
This wasn’t a misunderstanding. It was cruelty disguised as corporate protocol. Her body battles the invisible invader called cancer. Her destination: healing.
At Gate 5 of Los Cabos International Airport, she does not meet the smiling faces of stewards or the guiding hand of mercy. She meets a policy. One so rigid it forgets to breathe. She’s got cancer, a ticket, and a seat in first class — and United Airlines.
It is a curious thing, the ease with which modern systems deny mercy under the guise of protocol. Petra Smeltzer Starke had all the papers. A medical justification. A history with the airline. Yet she was cast aside not by accident, but by design.
United Airlines has a problem, and it’s not just lost luggage. It’s a systemic disregard for passenger well-being that borders on the criminal. If you are a healthy passenger, you’re a revenue unit. If you are a cancer patient. That’s not a flight; it’s a risk to your very life, and the company’s bottom line is co-piloting the plane.
Petra Starke, mother, lawyer, and cancer patient, boarded a United Airlines flight hoping for comfort and safety.
But Petra wasn’t a passenger. She was a variable.
What United did to Petra Smeltzer Starke isn’t just bad service—it’s corporate negligence. This wasn’t a lost bag or an overbooked seat. This was a woman with a life-threatening condition, left in a compromised environment by an airline that knew better. United gambled with Petra’s health.
Imagine a world where a mother with cancer boards a plane. And is thrown off and left to lie on the ground in an airport in Mexico. They left her without her wheelchair, with her medicine on board headed to Newark.
And the results were disastrous to Starke and meaningless to United.
Of course, there is United’s side, and I will try to give it in Part 2, along with the details of what United did to a woman fighting for her life with cancer.
To be continued…
Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.
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United will be taken down after the truth is out
Do you personally know the truth? Maybe lay it out for everyone….
Or what, they forced her to deboard, but then just took off to Newark with her checked wheelchair and luggage still on board the plane to Newark?
I don’t understand the woman’s side of the story, let alone the airline’s.
So she boarded a flight from Mexico to go to Newark. She was either asked to deboard or was forcibly removed from the plane? And then what happened?
coming in part 2
I fly regularly on United between Fort Myers, FL and the Northeast. Mostly, it’s smooth and I’m offered the courtesy of early boarding because of disability. However, there have been a few times when United has stranded me at an airport for 14 hours after numerous delays, false and misleading communication about the situation and finally having to pay for a taxi to a hotel with no compensation.
This does not compare to the horrors of a cancer patient taking a flight to receive treatment. The only similarity was United putting themselves first over the needs of the passengers and operating with a lack of transparency about the situation. Frankly, they made false claims as they did not want to make compensation to the passengers.
Corporate profits were put over the needs and fair treatment of passengers.
If Part 2 is going to give United’s defense of its own actions, it’ll be the shortest article The Frank Report has ever posted. How many words can you scrape together to defend the indefensible? They’ll probably try to argue that the flight was hazardous to the patient, we were concerned about their welfare, etc., etc. but when you consider they were reportedly left without their wheelchair and their medication, just how incredibly self serving and disingenuous any defense would be becomes obvious. Has anyone else ever noticed that when there’s a shockingly horrific incident on an airplane, the airline always seems to be United?