Originally Posted by
ATOBTTR
That’s true and a point I forgot about. Looking at my BP from the other day in “My Wallet” on my phone from a Delta flight, that particular BP format only displays boarding time. Departure time isn’t even listed. This human factor consideration drives someone who doesn’t look close enough and might misread to think “oh my God my next flight leaves in 20 minutes!” and not realize boarding time is 40 minutes before departure time and that they really have an hour, not 20 minutes. I certainly see this play out when we pull into the gate early and someone is trying to barge their way forward with the “my connection! my connection” and they give a line about how their plane is leaving in a time that’s less than minimum connection time for that airport despite us being early. Unless they were rebooked to a later flight and are trying to make the original connection they’re either misreading their boarding time versus departure time or they’re just full of baloney.
On a Christmas Eve flight into MSP, my seat mate looked at his boarding pass as we were landing and panicked that he had a negative connection time: the legal MCT allowed the previous flight to be scheduled to land after the boarding time shown on the boarding pass for the next flight. It was sudden panic and my pointing out that he was seeing the boarding time and not the departure time didn't help much. I was in the aisle of the second row of FC and as soon as the seatbelt sign went off, I jumped into the aisle and took a big step back to allow him to be the first passenger to get to the door of the aircraft. I later checked and his flight had a short delay, so I assume he made it home for Christmas.