Security Breach! Passenger Boards Plane with Wrong Boarding Pass
An American Airlines agent mistakenly gave a passenger a boarding pass with the wrong name on it — and the passenger was still able to board the plane. (Photo: Ale Ventura/PhotoAlto/Corbis)
Airline passenger LaShonda Traylor was able to board a flight using a boarding pass that was not hers. The mistake, it turns out, was the airline’s.
When LaShonda Traylor checked in for her American Airlines flight from Dallas–Fort Worth to Laredo International Airport, also in Texas, the desk agent gave her the wrong boarding pass — one with the name of man called Taylor.
She didn’t notice the blooper at that point — and neither did the TSA agents who cleared her through security. A third fail occurred at the gate, where the gate agent scanned her boarding pass, received a flashing red light, but allowed Traylor to board anyway.
Ironically, it was Traylor who finally discovered the mistake — when she was on the plane and looked at her boarding pass to find her seat.
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“It’s a moment I’ve never experienced, and I fly a lot,” told Fox News in a video interview via Skype. “I’m a female, he’s a male, and it was just… our names are somewhat similar but they weren’t similar enough to get that mixed up.”
American Airlines told Fox News that the plane would not have taken off without a resolution, because the gate agent compares the flight manifest to the number of passengers. And the TSA has said it’s looking into what happened, but did confirm that even though the boarding pass was wrong, Traylor and her bags were screened appropriately.
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As for Traylor, she had a very even-keel response to the incident: “I just hate to see people get in trouble. To me, maybe it won’t be a reprimand, maybe it’ll just be more education about risk factors and promoting safety,” Traylor told Fox News in a video interview via Skype. “I’m hoping that be the outcome of it.”
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This mistake comes on the heels of some other surprising errors and bad air travel behavior, including a recent incident at New York’s JFK airport where 13 passengers were allowed to bypass a customs checkpoint when they landed from Cancun, and a flight attendant who attacked crew members.
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