Yesterday’s big social media event was a series of tweets from supermodel Chrissy Teigen, who was on board an ANA flight to Tokyo when it suddenly turned around and headed back to Los Angeles. The reason, it turned out, was a manifest problem: the plane had two passengers who shouldn’t have been on board. One was supposed to be on a United flight and the other on a different ANA flight.
They keep saying the person had a United ticket. We are on ANA. So basically the boarding pass scanner is just a beedoop machine that makes beedoop noises that register to nowhere
— christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) December 27, 2017
Quite so, except that this applies to both passengers. If the boarding passes were scanned, they should have immediately flagged the passengers. So what happened?
Also, what seats did they sit in? Did their assigned seats on the other flights just happen to be open on this flight? Did they get into an argument with anyone about whose seat was whose? Shouldn’t that have tipped someone off?
I don’t really care that much about the celebrity tweets, but I am curious about how this happened. Between the scanner, the boarding pass check at the airplane door, and the likelihood of a seat conflict, it sure seems like this shouldn’t be able to happen even once, let alone twice. The explanation, when we eventually get it, should be fascinating.
