Delayed due to passenger count
 

On a flight this morning where the crew seemed very new. We pushed back 10 minutes early but now are sitting on tarmac delayed due to passenger count issue. Seems like the ground crew shows an extra boarding pass scanned vs the count on the plane.Can’t make this stuff up. In rush for D0 they forgot the very basics. Sigh.

Anyone encounter this before? Captains said delay should only be 5 minutes but that was 15 minutes ago …

Events like this don’t occur nearly as much as they did in the past but happen every day, on every airline.

Sure but over 30 mins in now and even the FAs cannot agree on passenger count. Never seen counting be so hard. Finally they are using a paper seating chart and verifying each passengers.

This was about 9 years ago, when I first started working, so LAA.

One early morning I had a flight out of DFW. I bleary eyed made my way to the gate, scanned my BP, boarded the plane, the FA hung my jacket and served me a coffee. All is well until the pilot comes on and welcomes everyone to the flight, said they're done boarding and doing some pre flight checks and we'd be off to Minneapolis -St Paul.

I was supposed to be headed to Detroit.

Somehow boarded gate A18 instead of A19 (or vice versa) #dumbass.

I think this happened on Trans Global Flight 2 when the coach count wouldn't tally, and they were doing a ticket check... and they decided to cancel the ticket check to depart quickly in a middle of a snowstorm.
"Cancel the ticket check..."

But you would have been checked into the flight by Jean Seberg!

Yes it happens.

You'd be surprised how many times you go through to count either empty seats, children, infants, or even every single pax, how many times your own count would be different.

It use to be a bigger issue in the past, but even in todays computer age, things happen.

But the mismatch is supposed to be found when the door is opened, not when you're on the tarmac and it's a lot more difficult to offload someone.

Ideally, yes. But humans make mistakes, computers glitch. LH refused to let me board in FRA as they said that I didn't fly BOS-FRA, despite having a boarding pass and being in FRA.... I certainly didn't teleport.

Also crew can make mistakes or just be bad at math. Had an AA flight where we ended up having to count off because the FA messed it up 4 times.

And of course, passengers don't listen. Count is done and someone pops out of the lavatory right at the end. Another time, a flight I was on was delayed as they were missing a kid - kid was onboard, the brilliant parents had allowed their kid to crawl underneath the seats :eek: and didn't say anything.

It's pretty rare overall. But plenty of opportunities for someone or something to make a mistake.

At what point do you offer to count for them?

And it worked out so well for them. Thankfully Dean Martin had his pilot’s license!

Sure. To the tune of about 2 hours (maybe even 2.5 hours?) when departing PTY. From what I recall, there was a SABRE outage that day so the check in process was fully or mostly manual. The 2 hour +/- delay was taken after we had closed up and pushed back from the gate.

Sometimes the passenger count is inaccurate because a person of size (POS) gets inadvertently counted as two passengers.

I was seriously tempted. It was A321 transcon and two FAs kept disagreeing about the J passenger count in additional to issues with economy, J is not a big cabin at all.

Um, no, more likely is they are counted as one passenger while they purchased two seats, so the count is under if they don’t properly adjust for EXST.