My SOP especially for early morning flights or situations when I'm tired/jet lagged is to verify the destination with the FA as I board the aircraft. Sometimes they almost laugh at me, but it could be pretty early to board the wrong flight when one isn't alert.
Originally Posted by
lixiaojuventus
The strange parts of the story are the following:
(1) Why does the scanner not set out an alarm for a wrong boarding pass? Or worse still, the scanner does trigger the alarm but the GA ignored it???
(2) The FA did look at the boarding pass when dealing with the seat conflict. How did s/he not recognize that this is a wrong boarding pass? The wrong destination shouldn't have escaped the eye of an FA!
I am very worried about this incident.
I agree, although it's increasingly rare for FAs on USA legacy carriers to look at boarding passes at the door, just when there's an apparent duplicate seat assignment. At that stage, some airline employee should look very carefully at all boarding passes. I've observed this when one of the passengers had indeed boarded the wrong flight.
Originally Posted by
findark
I mean.. even a non-English speaker should be able to look up at the gate display and tell the difference between "Paris" and "San Francisco". Pretty sure I could do that in any alphabet I'm even passingly familiar with (Latin, Cyrillic, Hangul). Obviously, the passenger was probably distracted for other reasons and UA shares responsibility, but yes I think that many people could have caught their own mistake.
Reminds me of
this - amazing how easy it is to get onto the wrong flight.
This is less obvious to me. Often one cannot hear airport and airplane announcements. If I can't understand them as a native speaker of the American language, I wouldn't expect foreigners who aren't comfortable with English to understand either.
Moreover, the way CDG airport is pronounced by American versus French speakers is very different.
If someone is confident that he/she knows the gate assignment, he/she probably doesn't consider it necessary to verify this on one of the somewhat cluttered screens at the gate. Maybe this isn't best practice, but it's reality.
Originally Posted by
rmadisonwi
The story of the FTer boarding the wrong flight made me wonder about the design of the boarding pass scanners, and in particular, the audio cues that they give.
In that thread, the poster stated that the scanner gave a beep for the wrong flight which sounded like the same beep as an exit row beep (presumably because the GA is supposed to verify that it's not a kid boarding with that seat). I'm sure when GAs are scanning 150+ boarding passes at a time, they can easily "zone out" (so to speak) and just hear the same beeps over and over again. If, in fact, the alert for the wrong flight is the same as the alert for the exit row, it's quite easy to see how a moment of inattention while performing a repetitive action a hundred times can lead to something like this. That would be a flaw in how the scanner system functions. (Ideally, the audio alerts would be different and distinct tones for each type of scan, maybe even a buzzer of sorts for "wrong flight" scans.) Yes, the gate agent should have been paying attention, but in a world of humans, it's easy to see how something like this could happen. You don't expect someone boarding the wrong flight, you do expect people to board with exit row seats, so the default assumption is that the audio alert is exit row or something similar, and by the time you even think something might be odd, several other passengers have boarded and the info is off the screen already.
IMO this was a major job failure of the GA. I've observed GAs ignoring the warning beeps (including not noticing that some old senile frail guy who wasn't able to board unassisted had been assigned by the GA to an exit row). In fact, once when my boarding pass beeped, the GA just noted my seat number and said that she would board me on the podium computer terminal after departure rather than checking the problem closing the door.
Originally Posted by
mherdeg
It really seems like a serious UX issue that the boarding pass scanners used by gate agents provide almost exactly the same audio feedback for:
(1) This sequence number has already boarded (duplicate/wrong BP)
(2) Verify exit row OK
(3) This isn't the flight we're boarding (scanned your SYR-EWR boarding pass on your EWR-SFO flight)
(4) The passenger's seat has changed, please advise them of their new seat
It's just an angry beep. Lots of angry beeps. Easy to imagine that a GA could mishandle a beep.
That being said, it seems like the degree to which "I boarded the wrong flight and ended up going somewhere I wanted to!" ends up being the airline's fault seems to depend a little bit on how much extrinsic anger popular culture currently has for the airline.
Human-computer interaction fails again.
Originally Posted by
luv2ctheworld
I do like the way LH at FRA/MUC airports have implemented the automated system where the BP is scanned by the machine and the turnstyle/baffle gate opens to allow you through.
Properly set up, this will allow for efficient checking of the boarding pass while those with issues can be pulled to the side and a manual review can be made.
Human factors analysis would suggest that maybe it's better to avoid having humans in the loop when they're being asked to pay attention to boring repetitive tasks that occasionally required detailed attention.