Originally Posted by Wingman32
I've had it happen coming out of BOS. Two kids ended up boarding the wrong Chicago bound flight on UA (the one flight was boarding at the latter flights boarding time due to delays). The kids went to the back of the bus, only to discover that row 32 did not exist. At this point an FA caught them and sent them back to the other plane. How do these people board the flight. Doesn't the GA scan/look at the BP?
I've seen this happen twice (once before we pushed back, the other time was prior to takeoff, but we'd been taxiing for a couple minutes and had to turn around).
In a discussion of this on the NW forum, a couple people said the problem is that (at least in the case of NW) the BP scanner only checks the seat number, and does not look at the flight #. With the scanners in use, most GAs seem to look at the BPs only long enough to find the barcode--it doesn't seem like they actually read anything in most cases.