How true!

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<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">I suspect what AF did is cancelled your seat assignments so someone else could sit together. ANd since you both were on separate PNRs, they probably didn't know to keep you together.

I agree. And herein lies the problem. Regardless of how or why this happened, or that it shouldn't have happened in the first place, once it has happened, you have two sets of passengers each holding boarding passes to the same seats. Clearly, one party or the other is not going to get to sit in their assigned seats, and whichever party that is could claim "but I have boarding passes that say in writing those are my seats!" Obviously, there is just no way for the airline to honor both sets of boarding passes, so making this argument is pointless. Generally speaking, when there's a dispute over assigned seating, whatever is in the computer prevails.

How this works out depends on whether the airline uses the electronic boarding pass readers at the gate. If they do, the problem will be detected at the gate, and generally speaking, you won't get on the aircraft until you have a new boarding pass with a new seat. This is good in that it prevents delays on board the aircraft, as it's not possible for two passengers to have the same seat assignments.

On airlines that don't have electronic readers, the problem isn't discovered until you're on board and find someone else in your seat. This happened to me once in a similar situation as described above. Two of us were on the same PNR and had adjacent seats and a connecting flight. When boarding the connecting flight, a lady and her small child were in our seats, and after the computer was checked, we had been moved to seats several rows apart, even though we were on the same PNR. Most likely, the lady and her child had arrived at the airport without seat assignments, and there were no adjacent seats left. So, we got moved. At first we were disappointed, but the flight attendant rectified the situation by offering to buy all our drinks (we were in coach). That solved the situation immediately . Such an accomodation would not have been possible had the airline used gate readers. Although it would have been better had the problem not happened in the first place, I thought it was quick thinking by the FA on how to resolve the problem and make everyone happy.

On flights where this is very important, such as the long international flight described above, and where two passengers are on different PNRs, it's probably a good idea to have the PNRs linked in the system, if that's possible, or at least have a note put in each PNR pointing to the other one. It probably won't make it impossible for this to happen, but less likely.