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CNN Live At Daybreak

Vanguard Airlines Filing Bankruptcy Today

Aired July 30, 2002 - 06:11   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Well if you are holding a ticket on Vanguard Airlines, we have news and it is not good. The financially strapped airlines has now canceled all flights through tomorrow and plans to file for bankruptcy today.

Want to get more from reporter Eric Burke of our affiliate WDAF in Kansas City -- good morning.

ERIC BURKE, WDAF-TV REPORTER: Well good morning -- good morning, Carol.

There is actually no activity going on here at the airport. We showed up about two hours ago, a photographer from Fox 4 did, and actually showed -- saw a number of people coming up to him asking you know what's the deal with Vanguard Airlines and are we going to be able to fly out today?

Show you right now that the ticket agents and ticket lines are no -- there's no ticket lines out there. Actually, all the ticket gates are empty. There are several signs out saying that in fact Vanguard Airlines is filing for Chapter 11 and their flights are suspended indefinitely. So right now there's really no -- no one really knows exactly what they're going to do. When people came out here this morning, they're like we heard the news last night but we felt sure they were going to be flying. That turned out not to be the case.

Now we talked to a number of passengers last night. A couple of two striking cases. One, a woman travelling with her two young boys, they're two and five. They were actually on a flight from Kansas City on their way to Dallas and got about a half hour out when Dallas said you know the weather's too bad here. Vanguard turned around, came back to KCI leaving this woman an hour later to find out that Vanguard has now gone bankrupt. And now she's got to find three tickets for herself and for her two kids to get back to Dallas and she has no friends, no family, no anything here in Kansas City. And it left her a little disappointed and a little outraged, as a matter of fact, because she's just not sure what am I going to do. I can't stay at the airport with me and my two young kids, and they were awfully, awfully tired.

Another one was there was a 12-year-old girl that was traveling alone. Security here at KCI, Kansas City International Airport, very, very helpful, making sure she had a cell phone often in contact with her folks and trying to make arrangements to go ahead and get her on another flight to get her home.

And really that's the main thing everybody that's going to be coming out to the airport today is trying to find an alternate way home. There are a number of airlines here. Frontier is being heralded by -- as -- by Vanguard as someone that they can go to for help. Delta's helped out. We have Southwest, American, every other airline here, so it's going to be really interesting to see how things happen here at KCI later this morning because an awful lot of airports -- other airlines are going to have to pick up the slack...

COSTELLO: Eric.

BURKE: ... for the now defunct Vanguard.

COSTELLO: I know.

BURKE: Back to you guys.

COSTELLO: A terrible situation for passengers. I want to ask you a question about Vanguard though, was this a surprise, because smaller airlines are doing pretty well these days like AirTran?

BURKE: It was a surprise for passengers to say the least. Now you know a lot of people saying you know did they know yesterday at 4:00 they were going to go bankrupt? Probably so, but the announcement not made official until midnight and it left an awful lot of people stranded here.

You know it's an airline that's just under a decade old, about 8 years old, has not posted a financial gain for a year ever in its -- in its history. It only posted a quarter gain one time and that was four years ago. So it's often heralded for not -- or I mean for posting and giving out some cheaper airline tickets to 18 different airports that it actually goes from KCI. So it was one of those airlines that a lot of people flew and obviously, a lot of people flying it yesterday and now trying to find another way home out of Kansas City.

COSTELLO: Oh a wish -- a wish of luck.

Eric Burke, thank you very much, reporting live from Kansas City this morning.

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