U.S. Pilot Treats Stranded Frontier Airlines Passengers to Pizza, Money from Own Pocket
If all pilots were as considerate and as caring as Frontier Airlines pilot Gerhard Bradner, flying passengers surely won't mind flight delays. Armed with 50 boxes of pizza, Bradner diverted what could have been a total PR disaster for the airline company, no thanks to bad weather.
Departing Washington, D.C. for Denver was already an hour behind schedule. Monday night's storm eventually forced Frontier Airlines Flight 719 to land at Cheyenne Regional Airport in Wyoming to make a pitstop for several hours.
While waiting the bad weather to pass, flight attendants were busy serving all the available food on the plane to its passengers.
But the dilemma came when the food ran out and yet the rains and winds continued to batter the airport, meaning Frontier Airlines Flight 719 still had to stay it out longer, but they don't know until what time.
The scheduled 3-hour flight dragged into a nearly 7-hour ordeal, and the pilot knew he had to do something to keep his passengers' minds off the weather, apart from being well-fed.
"Next thing you know, Domino's Pizza was rolling up to the plane," passenger Logan Torres told CNN.
"We had depleted all our food onboard," a Frontier representative told NBC News.
Brandner said he was hungry when the plane touched down, but it would be damn selfish and cruel to just order pizza for himself. So he decided to call Dominos and ordered 50 boxes.
Domino's Pizza manager in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Adam Ritchie, took the call. "I need to feed my whole plane," Ritchie recalled Bradner telling him. "Lucky me, I hear 160 people. It ended up being like 38 pizzas."
Bradner told him to deliver the pizzas to the tarmac ASAP.
At the back, the 160 passengers were probably toying with their heads how to cope up with the storm and delayed when they heard the pilot speak, "Ladies and gentleman, Frontier Airlines is known for being one of the cheapest airlines in the U.S., but your captain is not cheap. I just ordered pizza for the entire plane."
"If the need arises you need to take care of your family; you need to take care of your passengers," Bradner said in an interview with 9News. "We take care of each other and we consider our passengers an extended part of our family. And once they step foot on my airplane they are my responsibility, I'll be taking care of them. If that includes feeding them than so be it."
PR News commended Bradner's initiative. "Diverting any potentially negative story about air traffic delays, Bradner instead delivered a massive media hit for Frontier-all for the price of 50 pizzas."
Watch the video of the happy passengers who got delighted when the pizza came to them.