Is it Really Possible to be on the Wrong Plane?
 

Flying DL 745 DTW - SFO this morning. Full 767. With everyone boarded and the door closed, a woman walked to the front of the plane and said that she is supposed to be flying to SAN. Gate is called, bridge returned, door open, and she deplaned, then we shut the door and pushed back.

It seems surprising that the boarding pass scanner wouldn't have caught this, and then that on a full plane someone wasn't assigned to her same seat. Can this really happen?

This happened to me on an AF flight from CDG-MUC last month. They were boarding 2 flights right next to each other at the same time. A lady that was supposed to be going to ATH came over to our line (AFTER BP was scanned in proper lane), proceeded to board, take a seat, etc. No one found out until the FA's did the count and noticed that we were 1 over on our flight. They checked on the adjacent flight and they were 1 under.. and presto, it's solved. Of course, this took 30 minutes and both planes were delayed because of the lady.

Needless to say... amazing as it sounds, it DOES happen. (Also happened to me at Gate 46 A/B at EWR. - I think they have since stopped boarding both at the same time)

I've seen it happen at Logan - on the RJ hallway. They do recheck your boarding pass before you walk out to the plane - but I've been on a plane where someone walked out of door 10A and not 10B and ended up on the wrong plane...

I once successfully boarded an AA flight in AUS bound for LAX when my ticket was for a flight to DFW boarding at the same time at the adjacent gate. My BP beeped correctly and the GA noticed nothing. I became suspicious when I saw 3x3 seating and I thought I was flying on an MD-80. Fortunately someone was in my seat and I quickly determined I was on the wrong plane and was able to deplane before they shut the door. No one was able to explain why I was able to get on. And my BP also worked fine on the flight I was actually booked on.

In my experience most European flights (at least AF, KLM, BA, etc.) ask to see the boarding pass as you get on the plane--they are not looking at your name, just the destination.

I could see it happening at SLC.

I've seen it happen, both for mainline and for RJs where people walk or are bused to a cluster of baby airplanes parked on the tarmac.

If I'm jet lagged, running late, or not awake for a morning flight, I always verify the destination with FAs as I board. I've even heard the lead FA and pilot state the wrong destination during the pre-flight announcements, which sometimes leads to a big gasp and panic. One time someone even announced that we were about to land at the wrong airport.

My guess is that some of the problem is GAs not paying enough attention when then scan boarding passes, perhaps combined with passengers tending to race ahead to the jetway as soon as their boarding passes have been scanned. I say this because I notice GAs shockingly often not noticing the exit row alarm on the scanner and therefore failing to verify that people are exit row qualified. When I'm in an exit row, I volunteer that it's OK more often than not, and the GA usually looks a little surprised. When I notice during boarding that someone else is assigned to an exit row, it seems about 50-50 whether the GA notices or makes the required inquiries. It's worse on small RJs.

If the GA can miss the obvious exit row alert, I would guess that they can equally fail to notice or ignore an indication from the scanner than the passenger is boarding the wrong flight.

I used to be a gate agent for US in TYS. I can remember on more than one occasion passengers coming up the jetbridge and asking me what city they were in. One time a passenger was flying something like BOS-DCA-GSO, but in DC, she boarded DCA-TYS. So, when she got to TYS, I had to reroute her TYS-CLT-GSO. If she were FT savy, she might have done it on purpose to get the extra segments. ;-D

It was most common from DCA with the whole 35A one gate for every flight boarding mess, but it happened from other cities too.

In TYS, we had three departures back to back in the afternoon, and we would use one gate for two of them. I remember many times a passenger would try to board the wrong flight and if you weren't really paying attention, you'd sometimes let a few slip buy. When our counts didn't match up, we'd figure it out. Of course, we didn't have boarding pass scanners. We did manual seat entry so if you waited to input the seats, you wouldn't catch the dupe seat or a seat assignment not actually assigned on the flight until you put it in.

If I qualified by segments for PM, I'd try a little more of this!

+1

Particularly with puddle jumpers --- there or at JFK.

Bob H

It did happened to me in SLC. Was supposed to board an RJ to MSO, got on the plane and realized when i was about to seat that I had boarded the wrong one. Did not look very proud when I walked back outside :D

Habit can make you a victim as well. I once successfully got on SAN-DTW when my routing was SAN-MSP-DTW on PMNW. The SAN-MSP at 14:00 was reliably and always at gate 24 at SAN, so I plopped myself there as usual, GA made an announcement about 13:30 apologizing for a delay and I figured since the plane wasn't at the gate yet we'd be 10-20 behind. Apparently the announcement was for the outbound to DTW which was originally supposed to be arriving around 11:30 and turning right back. I marched up still suspecting nothing and not reading the board, scanner buzzed, GA called the actual MSP gate which had just pushed out of gate 25, but she had seats and after inquiring as to my final of DTW she put me on there. I did get full Y credit and extra EQM for the flight so I came out ahead in miles and in time with the direct but it was all entirely unintentional as I was just in my usual habit.

I did this way back when they used punchcard stock (like how CHI subways work?). ATL-MIA and ATL-FLL boarded at gates next to each other, and would fly whichever was cheaper, yet one week the mistake was made. They took the stock, ran it through, and let me board. Took some persuasion, yet they saw the error in their ways (um... did you do a head count?!), and they paid for ground transport MIA-FLL (had to pick up the car).

Sure it happened all the time, in CVG.

Did u getr mileage credit for bith flights :p

Haven't seen it happen on a flight I've been on since the Dark Ages (early 80's, when your boarding pass was a ticket jacket with the flight # and destination written on, and the seat assignment was a sticker obtained at the gate). I was flying DTW-PHL to visit my parents in South Jersey for Christmas, and NW had flights to PHL and DCA (and probably LGA and BOS as well) leaving from their then home in the A concourse at DTW at around the same time. In those days you didn't hear the periodic announcements of the flight number and destination during boarding, so the first announcement was at the beginning of the safety demonstration after we had begun taxiing. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, we'd like to welcome you to Northwest flight xxx to Philadelphia."

At just that moment there was a clear disturbance in the Force towards the back of the plane. About a minute later the pilot came on the PA, "Well, folks, it seems we have a couple of passengers here who want to go to Washington-National rather than Philadelphia, so we're going to go back to the gate and let them off, then we'll be on our way."

Now this was a Friday evening just before the holidays, so the flight had a fairly large number of business travelers who were not amused by the delay. Let's just say there was a heap of abuse piled on the two fairly elderly ladies who came shuffling up the aisle when we returned to the gate.

I did it once on AA at DFW several years ago. Late flight in, very tired. Waiting for my flight to board and was watching a movie on my laptop, not paying attention. They started boarding, I got on the plane. I am dozing pretty well while waiting to leave. As we are about to takeoff, pilot does an announcement that we were 2nd to take off and would be in San Antonio in about 35-40 minutes. Unfortunately, I was heading to Austin. It was too late to say anything, but afterwards I found out they moved the Austin flight two gates down while I was tuned out and I was not nearly aware enough to notice I boarded the wrong flight.

I did a one-way car rental to Austin and just added it to my expense report.

On a side note that is kinda related, I was once on a flight (AA again) where two people got combative with the flight crew when they found out the flight was to Ontario California, not Ontario, Canada. Unfortunately, we had already taken off. We had to land in El Paso to let off (and arrest) the passengers in question.

At least you were not going to Sydney

I think I would have noticed the non MD-XX plane. Not sure their range is quite good enough.

I am just glad it was not a flight to somewhere like Ohio or Oklahoma. I think then I would have said something.

I was doing DL LGA/RSW last year and we were bused from the terminal to a bunch of parked RJs on the field. I was first off the bus but there were several waiting a/c with doors open and the driver never indicated which a/c (although he could have after I left the bus.) To be sure (I was also the first on the a/c) I asked the FA if this a/c was going to RSW. So in situations like this I can see it happening. A normal gate boarding not so much.

Not anymore with AF and KL on its European flights.

Two weeks ago I was on a DL flight YYZ to DTW and thee were two pacs on board with the same seat assignment and the FA was not phased by that. The GA
was a bit more concerned, but they just reassigned one of the pacs and blaned the gate scanner.

This happened on my ATL-MSP flight last month. A guy got on board sat down, then when the FA's did the "welcome to flight..." announcement he got up and said he was supposed to be on the flight to Washington.

This was a typical one gate, one jetway, one airplane situation. So like the OP asked, how does this happen with the boarding pass scanners?

Last month, I got on my DTW-LAS flight, and saw that the flight attendants fairly tanned, with great happy smiles. One of them were wearing a Lei (those Hawaiian flower necklace). I secretly hoped that I somehow got on the wrong plane and is heading to Hawaii instead of Vegas.... Unfortunately, after they closed the door and made the pre-flight announcement, they confirmed we were going to Las Vegas... However, thats not what this thread is about.

I've also seen multiple times people who got on the wrong flight and didn't find out until they're physically on the plane. I suspect the bar-code on the boarding pass doesn't contain a lot of information other than name and seat number... Perhaps someone smart enough to know bar-code can figure it out...

On a similar topic, I've sometimes scan the wrong boarding pass (unintentionally) to a flight (used the later connecting flight's boarding pass), and always got red-buzzed.

There was a famous case in the news a few years ago of someone boarding a plane to--and arriving in--Ackland when they wanted to go to Oakland, which was a short distance from where they started. Apparently it was something in the accent that was making the announcements versus their own pronunciation of the two cities that caused the problem.

From those days I remember signs next to the stairs indicating the destination of a plane.

Somewhat like the signs next to the doors of some trains.

This would be useful now in some airports where there are a bunch of RJs parked together.

I would imagine it also contains date and flight number information via the confirmation number? But sometimes, when the BP doesn't scan properly, they'll just look at the seat number and enter it manually. This may be an issue for some of the wrong-flight boardings.

It definitely can happen at the Delta Bus Depot (Gawd I hate that place).

MO

Happend to me a couple of months ago on ATL-SAT. My inbound was supposed to be late but catched up lots of time and we had no issues with that gate. I rushed over and boarded with my AF-issued BP. I was upgraded T-7 so seat was 3A. The machine beeped, showed my name and seat number (as encoded in the 2D barcode) - all good. However, my seat was already occupied. The GA who investigated confirmed that I was moved to a later flight.

I remember hearing stories about that happening pretty often at JAX back in the day. US used to park four to six DHC-8-100/200s outside of a gate at the end of the concourse for the tag routes they'd run (JAX-XXX-CLT) each morning. Because they parked all the aircraft next to each other and boarded simultaneously (all flights would typically leave between 6:00 AM-6:15 AM), it was not unusual to have people doing the plane-to-plane shuffle before rolling out.

I shouldn't admit this, but it actually happened to me.

I was flying between Indianapolis and MSP, I checked the gate assignment after I checked in at security, when I got the gate and even over the entry door, every check showed the gate as being the correct one for MSP. I boarded the plane that Delta indicated was going to MSP (after of course being checked in by Delta team) and when I sat in my seat as we were getting ready to depart they announced the 'short flight to DTW', I panicked. Checked with fellow flyers and we were indeed headed to DTW not MSP. I alerted the FA, was escorted off the plane and then was able to board my correct flight.

Ridiculous but true....perhaps a blonde moment....or as I prefer to think of it ineptitude in signage in every step of the journey.

I boarded the wrong flight once, traveling from PHL to ORD via CVG about 5 years ago, they were boarding the ORD segment and another flight through one gate at CVG, when you got to the bottom of the stairs the covered walkway split in two directions, my luck I picked left instead of right. I get on the plane, take my seat, and before they close the door they announce the flight is going to LEX. Yikes! I go up to the front of the plane, explain what happened, the pilot called operations and had them bring the ORD flight (which had just pushed back), to return to the gate, he then went into the cargo hold, found my carry-on bag for me, and walked me over to the correct flight. Amazing customer service! I got the pilots name and wrote a very nice letter to DL thanking him. It was the most embarrassing flight in my 30 years of travel; needless to say there were not too many friendly faces on my fellow passengers on either aircraft. I did notice that a few weeks later they started checking boarding passes at certain airports when you got on the RJs, I guess they enacted the BergerPHL rule.

Only last year I was boarding at LAX for my flight to SFO at gate 54 and the scanner was broken and the GA let me on through. Well, there are two gate 54's; 54A and 54B. I was supposed to be at 54B and I was boarding at 54A. I caught my mistake as I was walking down the jetway. Almost ended up in JFK.

This is how my buddy ended up in ANC instead of SJC from PHX. He fell asleep after the flight took off (I don't know if they neglected to state the destination in the announcements or he was simply not paying attention) and woke up several hours later. When asking the person next to him how much longer, he received "should be about 3 more hours". Since PHX-SJC isn't that long to begin with, he was rather confused.

Needless to say, he's not too travel savvy.

And we all felt relieved when Danny Tanner, Uncle Jesse and Uncle Joey were there to pick up the girls when they got back to SFO.

One of my favorite experiences was actually being awake for an "initial descent" announcement. Pilot got on the PA and said something like, "We're beginning our initial descent into....umm....(aside) hey Steve, where are we going?... (back into mic) I guess we're heading into Jacksonville today...." Didn't know whether I should've been :p or :confused:

This should prove interesting: http://shaun.net/2011/05/whats-conta...-pass-barcode/

In the comments there are links to online tools that will decode barcode images that you upload. I did a couple of mine and there's some nifty stuff. Apparently I've been the first person to check in to a couple of my flights. :D

lol, was thinking the same exact thing