Delta Air Lines lost an 80-year-old man with Alzheimer's disease who was supposed to have been given an escort between flights in the Atlanta airport, said his relatives.
Antonio Ayala was flying from New York's LaGuardia airport to El Paso, Texas, and had to change planes in Atlanta. He disappeared after his flight landed and was not found until nearly 24 hours later, near a bus station in downtown Atlanta, several miles from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
Delta spokeswoman Peggy Estes said the airline was not told of Ayala's medical condition and it cannot be held responsible for the whereabouts of every adult passenger.
The airline flew Ayala's relatives to Atlanta and housed them in a hotel while they waited for him to be released from the hospital. It is not the first time that a person with Alzheimer's has been lost by an airline. In 2001, Margie Dabney, 70, became separated from her husband during an American Airlines stopover at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. Dabney was never found. Last year, her husband, Joe Dabney, agreed to an undisclosed settlement with American Airlines. He had sought $10 million.
Sciacca is not really on the tourist trail
although it is extremely pleasant and some of the upper town is
really picturesque. There is no really cheap place to stay, though
the Paloma Bianca in Via Figuli was not really dear. The main
appeal of Sciacca for me is the fact that it is an ideal place for
an excellent bus trip to the hill village of Caltabellotta. Sicily
has so much to see [I missed the lovely west coast and most of the
interior, including a terrific Roman villa] that I suspect a lot of
people never make it to any of the smaller towns. Even though I
obviously saw them at the cost of some better known larger places,
Erice in particular, I feel that it is a pity not to sample some
and this is a beaut. From my knowledge of Sicilian hill villages I
would say that somehow they are less picturesque from a distance
but quite as good when inside them as those of the mainland. On the
ride to Caltabellotta it is going up high, rather than heading for
the village, which gives the pleasure and you need to be well up in
the village to see it at its best.
This was only my fifth night out of eleven but already lack of time
was forcing me to adjust my plans. I had meant to go right around
the island anti-clockwise and hopefully to do a trip into the Villa
Imperiale inland. I now realised this was far too much to take on
and I abandoned any notion of reaching the west coast or Segesta, a
spectacular site to the west of the island’s capital, Palermo. This
meant cutting from the south coast to the north at Palermo itself.
I decided on one further southern escapade first – a trip to the
ancient Greek settlement of Selinunte It was necessary to change at
Castelvetrano from the bus bound for Trápani to the local minibus
to Selinunte and the modern village of Marinellla which is little
more than the accommodation for those going to see Selinunte. It
turned out that the wait in this rather ordinary place
[Castelvetrano] was going to be over an hour and a half, and then
when the bus was quarter of an hour late.
The eastern temples were mainly erected in the sixth century BC and
one of them, Temple E as it rather prosaically named, was
reconstructed in the 1950s. Apparently this was and is
controversial but I feel no qualms about it as long as some are
left as they are found. Whatever, it is a magnificent building and
I am sure a full size re-construction must be the best way of
illustrating to children what these temples were like. The
Acropolis area contains another five temples and most of the
ancient living area as well as the remains of the great walls.
These walls, however, are older than the rest of the remains,
having been built after the city had been destroyed once by
Carthage in order to defend the high ground from further
destructions.
