Originally Posted by
uclacolumbiaunc
I didn't board a "wrong" plane, but I arrived at the gate about 20 minutes before departure time, and saw no one lining up to board the aircraft, so I didn't bother asking why, cuz there are a lot of people sitting in chairs in the waiting area, and so I thought boarding hadn't started yet due to some type of delay, as normally, you'd see a line of people getting to board the plane 20 minutes before gate closes. Well, it turns out that I was the last passenger, and I did NOT hear any announcement making last boarding call, and the status on the TV screen at the gate indicated NOTHING (in fact, no status at all, no mention of boarding, final boarding, delay, etc).
So the aircraft left without me.
I had this happen twice...
In one incident, I got to gate about an hour early. Since it was way too early I went to go get breakfast. When I went back to the gate 30 minutes later, it was empty and I was one of the last to board. They boarded 30 minutes early! To make things absolutely terrible, this was on Southwest so my friend and I had to get middle seats and couldn't even sit next to each other!
In another incident, I got the gate about 2 hours early (international). There was a lot of activity around the gate but it was a zoo so my friend and I went to go get some beers (we were in Germany). We walked back to the gate an hour later and it was empty. The gate agency saw us and started screaming at us saying that he was looking for us, paged us multiple times, etc. and that since we didn't show up, they just took our bags off the plane and it was getting ready to leave. We tried to get on the plane since it didn't take off yet but he was so pissed that he didn't let us on.
Turns out that we were just stupid...we flew from LAX-LHR and changed our watches at LHR and when we got to FRA we forgot to change our watches again.
Plane left without us. It was late at night so we got a hotel room at the airport, took another flight the next morning.
I still say that the second incident was the dumbest thing I ever did in my life...