In a move that’s sure to keep passengers and travelers in general talking for a long time, an All-Nippon Airways flight that found an extra passenger on board turned an 11-hour trip to Tokyo into an 8-hour flight to nowhere—or at least, back to LA, where it started.
Four hours into the flight, the pilot was notified by cabin crew that an an unauthorized passenger was aboard. The man, who had a ticket to Tokyo on a United Airlines flight, was sitting with his brother, properly ticketed on ANA. According to the airline’s statement, “The pilot in command made the decision to return to the originating airport.”
It’s not clear how the passenger was boarded, and why the scanner at the gate did not recognize the incorrect boarding pass. And many of the 226 passengers were more than a little upset that the matter couldn’t have been handled later at the Tokyo end. Without explanation, though, the airline did tweet an apology: We take great price providing exemplary customer service and on this flight we failed to do so.”
When I worked in a library, checking in returned books to be reshelved sometimes the scanner would beep even though the barcode hadn’t actually registered in the computer. So if we didn’t watch the screen, but depended on the sound, occasionally a book would still be checked out as far as the system was concerned. A long-winded way of pointing out that may be akin to what happened in the case of the ANA passenger.
That was close to my guess…scanner doesn’t beep, agent looks at boarding pass, sees LA to Tokyo and date, and United (which had codeshare on the flight) and waved him on. Might even have glanced at list and seen brother’s similar name.