She was a first time flier!! Flight Foul-up Sends Woman to Wrong City 1,000 Miles From Destination
Oh, I have heard of people getting on the âcorrectâ plane, but then arriving in the wrong Birmingham⊠They were not first-time flyers but geographically challenged.
I wonder how many people might have gone to the wrong Springfield or Portland.
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About 10 years ago we got on a flight from the west coast to east coast. Someone came and told the person behind us. âYouâre in my seat!â The guy said he was not. And said what seat he had booked. He was in the right seat, wrong plane. They had switched our gates at the last minute (maybe 30 min prior.) He didnât get the memo. He would have wound up 2000 miles away from his destination.
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Shouldnât the boarding pass scanners at the gate have detected the error when the passenger tried to board the incorrect plane?
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A long while ago, I was flying to non-stop West Palm Beach from Boston with a friend. Everyone on the plane had changed into light weight clothes before boardingâŠexcept the third person in our row. They were wearing long pants, boots, a full length fur coat, and a hat. I remember wondering whyâŠ
WellâŠyou know how the pilot gets on and tells where the plane is heading? We were over NJ heading south and the pilot got on and told how we would be leaving the New Jersey area. WellâŠthe woman next to us went nuts. Started screaming how they had to land the plane immediately because she was flying to Newark. Needless to say, she created quite the scene. Of course they didnât land the plane. But they did escort her to first class, contacted Newark and had the people who were meeting her paged and notified of the issue. They also booked her on the first flight back to Newark from West Palm.
What happened wasâŠshe had a boarding passâŠthis was before electronic scanners. She lined up and got on our plane instead of the one at the adjoining gateâŠwhich was flying to Newark. Her seat number on our plane was not occupied so no one knew until the plane was south of Newark.
I guess thank goodness for those electronic scanners when boarding now. This wouldnât have happened if they had been in use then.
I will add, the woman waited for us when we got off the plane and apologized for creating a scene.
My friend I was flying with said âhow come I always end up next to a stranger with an issueâ.
I regretted not saying anything to this passenger when she boarded the plane dressed for winter.
That was our question. I would have thought so!
But thatâs what was weird. When it happened to us, there were electronic scanners. This was in 2014. How did he get by? Nobody noticed an error? Or maybe it didnât scan well and they thought it beeped.
Just got back Sunday night at about 9:30pm from Asia to SFO. Seemed like the only flight arriving at the time as customs was pretty quiet. Husband and daughter already have Global entry previously. Daughter was unnerved as she said it was so fast and almost nothing was checked that it seemed scary. My son and I submitted Global entry applications earlier (very fast and easy process-took maybe 10 minutes and was approved the next day) this summer in hopes to get an interview but as others have confirmed there is truly nothing on the websites available (Guam or maybe some places Midwest?). So we tried for Entry on arrival as my daughter got hers this way a few months ago returning from Mexico (she had to wait an hour or two around 10pm but it was worth it to her). The customs officer told us to walk down towards the Global entry arrivals interview kiosk, warning us depending on what flights arrived, there could be 15-20 people ahead of us, meaning 2 hours or more. When we got to the sign in clipboard, there was only one person signed up ahead of us. We waited perhaps 5-10 minutes for them to finish and the officer said he could take us both as we were related. Very few actual questions, but he explained the procedures and rules and we took photos, fingerprint scans and met my husband and daughter just as they picked up our checked luggage. On arrival truly is the way to go if you are traveling from somewhere international. Good luck!!
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That could have been my husband! 
He totally walked into a wrong plane once when flying home from SV. Unfortunately, the seat was empty, and he had to scramble to get out when he overheard the FA talking about a different west coast city!
This happened when gate agents were manually inspecting boarding passes and entering pax in the computer.
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My BIL has had a real talent for either booking the wrong time (booking pm instead of am)
or showing up for an am flight at pm (missed that one too!)
I saw several unrelated passengers turned away from boarding my Southwest flight in June. One was at the completely wrong gate and another was scheduled for the next flight out of our gate.
My grandma once slept through her destination and wound up in the wrong city. She got off the plane and immediately saw someone she knew who offered to take her home until the next day when she could fly to her original destination. She was always very lucky!
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On a slightly different travel related topic - I wish there was more public discussion about the benefits ofâŠshowering before a plane flightâŠ
When you are jammed shoulder to shoulder with a crowd in a tiny container with recirculating air - please do the right thing!
Just had a cross-country flight next to a gentleman who clearly did not follow that pre-flight process! [rough] And I am not a sensitive smeller! Lol A friend just flew to Amsterdam from the US and had the same experience.
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Weâve been near people like that too.
Another âpublic service announcementâ - people sitting next to you donât really want to smell your perfume for hours, even if you love it.
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We certainly remember the time when the grandparents came to visit our kids when they were babies. Their bags were all checked in and then we were saying goodbye at the airport coffee shop when a diaper exploded all over grandmaâs pants. Iâm sure that didnât make fellow passengers happy on the 12 hour flight back to Europe.
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I do - unless of course, my flight gets cancelled, I ended up sleeping in the terminal, racing around trying to get out of that darn town - possibly having to make tight connections along the way.
Suddenly, my shower from two days ago doesnât quite carry over that wellâŠ
So I try to allow for the fact, that people are not always in control of their situation.
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We had the opposite problem happen to us years ago. I took my family on vacation, including our 3 kids. Everything went well on the flight out but when I went to check in online the morning of the return flight, they refused to check my at the time very young daughter in. I called customer service (United) and started a long, frustrating back-and-forth with 2 agents, including a supervisor. The gist was that apparently the gate agent must have not successfully scanned my daughterâs ticket correctly getting on the flight but let her through. So even though she was on the flight with us and took up a seat, the one she was assigned, United now took the position that she had not been on the flight and that I was lying. It didnât matter that I explained that my daughter was with me and that we obviously couldnât fly back without her, he didnât care. He didnât leave open the possibility that it was an error on their side â the only explanation was that I was lying and my daughter wasnât on the flight but that I magically got her to our destination another way and was now trying to cheat them by getting her on a flight I already paid for and which they would not even refund me because according to him my daughter was a âno showâ on a non-refundable ticket. He wanted me to pay a premium for a new last minute ticket with her and have her sit with strangers.
I finally got the supervisor to reluctantly let her on the flight, though they had given up her reserved seat and one of us had to swap and sit elsewhere.
The crazy part though, and this was well past 9/11 and all the extra security measures, is it shows that the airlines do absolutely nothing to confirm their seat counts. If they had, it would have been obvious she was in the seat on the first flight.
One of the 1 million reasons United is one of the worst companies to ever exist.
And please donât eat a heavy garlic meal the night before!
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Probably missed one scan as the entire family presented all their boarding passes.
Curious - did she have a bag checked to her ticket, that should have flagged the situation at departure (a mis-matched bag loaded on a plane)?