> He made sure that he boarded before the the passenger who had the boarding pass information that he stole; when the other passenger tried to board, the system suggested that this passenger had already boarded, though the gate agent assumed it was a glitch, so allowed that person to board
I was wondering exactly this, how is it possible to use a boarding pass twice. The answer is, "the agent assumed it was a glitch".
It's interesting that we use machines, and when they flag the type of error they were designed to identify, we simply assume they don't work. Many plane accidents happen for a similar reason, the pilots thinking the systems on board are wrong and they're right.
Why don't we trust the machines? Is it because they have bugs and are sometimes actually wrong? Or because we trust our feelings more?
If the checking had been on paper, with the agent simply ticking off a list of passengers at the gate, would they have made the same mistake and assumed they got it wrong? What if the list had been ticked off before by somebody else?
> Why don't we trust the machines? Is it because they have bugs and are sometimes actually wrong? Or because we trust our feelings more?
I can't recommend enough to read the book "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety" by Eric Schlosser. You will be surprised how often we barely escaped nuclear war because wise people chose to not trust the machines.
You should have stopped it earlier. There is such a thing as advantage slots, and many software developers are drawn to advantage play. Because of knowledge.
Okay, but is there something particularly wise about getting an alert that a boarding pass has already been used and presuming it must be a glitch? I would only call that wise if the operator in fact had knowledge about how the system works and could explain why that alert was likely to be a glitch.
> Okay, but is there something particularly wise about getting an alert that a boarding pass has already been used and presuming it must be a glitch?
Did the gate agent do any follow up verification? Like checking the flagged passenger's ID?
In retrospect, modern computer systems are inscrutable and unreliable enough (as a category) that it's rational to disregard them, especially if you've done some independent verification. Rational doesn't always mean correct in a specific case.
The ID checking the second time probably would have worked since that was presumably the real person. They don’t normally collect ID at boarding according to the article so they wouldn’t be able to see the previous person’s ID.
Exactly. I don't see how strictly trusting the computer would have lead to a better outcome:
1. Computer says no, leading to the true passenger being rejected. Probably would have resulted in the guy managing to steal her seat and maybe not getting caught.
2. Computer says no, overreact, and reconcile everything until the computer is satisfied (e.g. deplane everyone and start over, maybe checking IDs). I'd guess this attitude would result in hundreds or thousands of delayed flights when everything was fine.
Sure, but it says he made sure to board before the correct passenger… it didn’t alarm for him because he was the first. When the second passenger came through, they would ask them for ID and it would be correct because it was actually them.
In this specific case, it's quite possible that the gate agent, being a costumer service worker, didn't want a fuss. If someone comes to a gate agent with a boarding pass, they're most likely not double-spending the pass, and suggesting otherwise to them would be a quick way to a tweet saying "today I bought a plane ticket, and when I tried boarding I was told I already boarded and they refused to reimburse me, do not fly [airline]". Of course it would have been the "correct" course of action here but as someone who has interacted with The Public, the gate agent did their best.
Beyond that, the UX of this is always subverted by incentives.
The system's incentive: (1) make sure no pass is used to board more than once, (2) indicate whether all ticketed passengers have boarded, and if not which are missing
The gate agent's incentive: (1) board everyone as pleasantly and quickly as possible
So the errant boarder played on the misaligned incentives and time pressure, to bet that the gate agent would ignore any errors.
I'm incredibly distrustful of any system that requires:
- Someone deal with a rare situation
- In realtime
- Under pressure
- While not being incentivized against an adverse outcome
"Well, the person didn't do what they were supposed to in the 1-in-1,000,000 situation" isn't a valid design strategy. (See self-driving-car-interventions and TSA agents)
They are being incentivized against an adverse outcome: the outcome of a paying passenger (or a whole planeload of paying passengers) missing their flight, connections, etc. That's why they make the decisions they do.
Accidentally carrying a non-paying passenger on an underbooked flight is also adverse I guess but it's not the only way the system can err and it's not the only thing they are trying to avoid.
With this comment you've demonstrated why voting machines will never be trusted fully; lack of understanding.
You understand paper and pen. It's right there. A child fully understands the dynamic.
As soon as the process moves into a machine, you cannot even tell if your checkmark is really counted.
This is doubly worked into distrust, by the amount of bugs, weird isses, and strange behaviour software exhibits to end users. People are trained from youth, via personal experience, how incredibly buggy and untrustworthy computers are.
They crash, can lose data, be wrong, and the worst of it? The layman cannot even figure out why. Computers are a black box, a mystery, they function by magic.
No expert, no claims of audits, or oversight, will ever, ever refute what end users know. Computers make mistakes all the time.
Taking these impressions and incorporating them into the votng system is madness for democracy.
The trust model for paper ballots and observed human counting is so superior to any proposed or implemented electronic voting that it's madness to downgrade to electronic.
I agree completely, but find that my argument is easier to explain to literally everyone, where as describing trust models is harder to explain to many, and invites debate from others.
> With 75 presidents of different Argentine clubs voting, on election day something went wrong when the final count resulted in a draw of 38 to 38 (76 votes in total). The explanation given was that one of the electors put a double vote and that mistake was not reported. As a result, the executive committee decided to postpone the election.
As with anything, paper voting must be done correctly. There are literally hundreds of years of tweaking, bugfixing if you will, of process and method around paper voting.
Proper paper voting cannot be gamed by ballot stuffing. Voting paper has serial numbers, is guarded like a currency during creation, and like currency during transfer, has checks and bounds at both ends, is counted by representatives of all parties, the list is endless.
For example in Canada you vote, fold the form shut from prying eyes, take it to the lady with the ballot box (usually a retired person), and she detaches the two parts of the card, one she keeps, the other you deposit into the sealed ballot box under her watchful eye.
There is no chance to stuff anything extra, again members of all political parties are present, and any trickery is made doubly difficult by unknown serial number ranges at the voting station. A serial number you are assigned when your voting card is taken off of the randomized stack.
I assure you any "but... what about..." has been thought of, and any security hole you perceive is likely just me missing facts.
Here the ballots are printed in normal paper. Each party prints their own, and the goverment send them to the polling stations. But other parties may steal the ballots from the voting booth, so each party must print additional ballots to replace them, just in case.
There is a plan to make a single ballot printed by the goverment, but the local county chiefs don't like it becuase it avoids a lot of dirty tricks. (The elections are quite fair anyway. The petty cheating just changes very little globaly. I don't agree with cheating, but I can't fix it.)
Some parties distribute their ballot before the election to avoid the missing ballots problem. Some local county chief ever distribute their own local ballot with the national ballot of the opposing party if people want to vote a combination. Some people distribute old ballots to that are invalid to void the votes of confused persons of the other party. In some places, the rabbit hole is deeper than you think.
I don't know what to say, exceptn such rampant fraud and miscreantic activity is the problem.
And that has nothing to do with paper ballots.
Here, you'd end up in jail for those things, and trickery wouldn't get you out of it. And you'd get caught too, because members of your own party would turn you in.
I'm not sure what happened, they never released an official explanation. (It may have been just cheating, but my conspiracy theory is that it may have been a truce between the two factions to get a few more days to negociate.)
The other reason I don't want to use machines for voting is that it's not that much work to count them manually. We've been doing it well before computers existed. Government has never been interested in efficiency before, so why suddenly care about it with the most important component of a democracy?
It could happen with any analog system. If it's fill-in-the-bubble, how do you count underfils? Or one candidate fully filled and the opponent slightly filled? When you get 10M pen and paper samples, you'll get sampling errors, and in a close election, there won't be a clear winner.
>> You understand paper and pen. It's right there.
> You think you do, but then you look into the 2000 Bush-Gore election. We'll never know who actually won because of hanging chads.
Punch cards are not "paper and pen."
> It could happen with any analog system. If it's fill-in-the-bubble, how do you count underfils? Or one candidate fully filled and the opponent slightly filled? When you get 10M pen and paper samples, you'll get sampling errors, and in a close election, there won't be a clear winner.
A paper and pen system may not be perfect, but regular people can understand it fully including the failure modes and exceptions.
No so with computer systems, they can be so totally inscrutable. What if instead of hanging chads, it was a buffer overflow that corrupted 500 votes before they could be tabulated? CNN could have experts talk about it nonstop for a week, and all most people would get out of it is that computers are inscrutable and unreliable.
Yes, hanging chads created by a machine, punching answers through perforated hole cutouts. Perforated holes, which started to break and fall out more and more as the ballots were counted.
The ballots were fragile, and this is an example of not using pen and paper.
You're actually proving my point here. Keep it simple! Pen and paper is perfectly fine, and all problems with how to handle the marking has been resolved for centuries.
It's change that is the problem here, and change for no sensible reason.
There's nothing to fix, to improve, to resolve with paper ballots. Nothing, except the pocket books of companies pushing ridiculous solutions.
In some ways, but the ability to erase a pencil mark is a huge issue with ballots.
IMHO, pens with tamper resistant ink, plus a process for making an exchange for a new ballot paper in case of a marking error, is a much better choice.
Canada uses pencil too. Erasing ballots and remarking them is never an issue, why would it be?
The security is in how ballots are treated, how they are monitored and handled, not how they are marked. It's never a problem that they are in pencil. Ever.
If someone has an opportunity to monkey with the ballots? The system has already failed.
As I said in another post, if you think you found a hole, it's because you didn't research what's actuallly happening.
It works fine until there's a high-profile, close election. Then you'll discover the data source was noisier than you thought. We're only talking about one in a thousand people goofing up a vote and moving on.
> Some of those challenged ballots in San Mateo County had illegible or no postmark dates and Assistant Chief Elections Officer Jim Irizarry said they were waiting on information from the U.S. Postal Service
With small margins, an election could come down to how people read a smudged postmark. It might not be an issue, but you won't know who "really" won, either. It depends how you count it.
My guess it had happened a few times in the past and had always been "glitches" or passenger doing something silly which also gets blamed as a "glitch".
1) Give the ticket to the first person in the check point, get scaned, talk to the their children that is makin fuzz, give the ticket to the second person in the check point, alarm, nobody remember that they gave the ticket to the first person because everyone was in autopilot.
2) Give the ticket to the first person in the check point, get scaned, notice that the partner went to the bathroom, wait, give the ticket again to the first person in the check point, alarm, nobody remember that they gave the ticket to the first person because everyone was in autopilot.
You're traveling as a family. You print boarding passes and distribute them to everybody. Somebody loses theirs. So you print new copies, but you don't necessarily give people the same seat number as the first time.
When boarding the plane, one of you reaches into their bag and grabs the one they thought they had lost. So two of your family members are using the same pass, and one is going unused.
No harm is caused because the number of passengers on the plane is still as expected, and the family is able to figure out for themselves who takes which seat.
I was just recently traveling with someone and they had a copy of both of our boarding passes (I just had mine). I boarded first and heard behind me some issue happening: they'd accidentally given my pass so it popped up as already boarded. They just switched to the right pass and there was no issue. It would have been a little more complicated if we had just happened to board in the opposite order, though.
So, I'm sure the general issue of "this pass was used already" happens a lot. How often it gets resolved without the would-be passenger presenting a "good" one, who knows.
I would disagree with that. The boarding ID had been used once and can't (shouldn't) be used twice. In that case the first use was in error but the system can't know that. So the correct course of action would be to re-check everyone's boarding pass. That may have been impractical / undesirable, but simply ignoring the error as a bug seems careless.
I don't think their checks caught him though? He only got caught because the plane was full, and he stood out like a sore thumb when he couldn't sit down somewhere.
This is because we don't have a plausible scenario for that case. "Sir, you already boarded the plane, please leave the airport" is not going to work. Calling the police, making a fuss with getting all the people off the plane and then back on is a lot of damage for the company in late flights and missing connections.
We don't trust the machines because some of us aren't outsourcing their critical thinking faculties. If this person assumed it was a computer glitch that probably means that it happened before and they guessed, probably correctly, that glitches happen more often than people trying to reuse boarding passes
This is an individual in a specific situation. I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head why they might have done what they did.
Most importantly, there might not even be a standard process to follow here - remember this passenger was properly ticketed. There previously was a glitch. The agent probably didn't want to deal with angry passengers (there was a fight between passengers and a Delta agent in the past couple years).
It's true the system may have glitched in the past, but IMO the bigger issue is that the system provides no troubleshooting steps. What if it snapped a photo of every passenger as it scanned their ticket. Then on a duplicate scan it could display the photo of the passenger who already scanned the ticket. That could help the gate agent to actually troubleshoot the warning and figure out what happened.
Once I accidentally got on the wrong plane, because two flights at adjacent gates were boarding at the same time. Apparently the boarding pass scanner didn't even check that the flight matched! It turned out that the person who actually had my seat on that flight was really late and so we didn't find out until just before the plane left the game. Fortunately I was able to rush over and make it onto my actual flight. But it would have been awkward if the other passenger hadn't made it at all...
I came within a cat's whisker of being flown from Molde, Norway to Oslo rather than to my intended destination of Bergen when I was a teen.
Molde Airport is a very small affair, a handful of flights every day, and no such fancy thing as boarding tunnels; rather, you were just passed through at the gate and let onto the apron, where a plane would be waiting.
Only on that day, there were TWO planes waiting, one hidden from view behind a hangar - but both were from then national flag carrier Braathens.
So, I get out from my gate as the very last passenger, having bought a standby ticket, so no pax to follow, lemmings style, to my plane.
Walking over to single plane in view, I board and find my seat on the nearly empty flight, door closes, pre-departure briefing, taxiing towards runway.
And then they announce that estimated flight time to Oslo will be 45 minutes. Uh, Oslo?
So, I call for a stewardess, who suggests that whatever I may need, just wait until we're airborne. 'Uh, that's kind of the point - I am going to BERGEN, not Oslo.'
She runs off to alert the captain, and a minute or two later, a truck with boarding stairs come zipping alongside, I disembark, get driven over to the plane to Bergen and as I board the correct plane, a guy is getting off the Bergen-bound plane and is driven over to the plane I had just left.
As we both had stumbled onto the wrong plane, the tally matched the expected numbers and all seemed normal - until they'd announced where we were actually going, that is.
A family member managed to do this. Both flights were packed, but somehow their seat was empty in the other flight, so didn't notice.
Both flights were going to Cyprus, one to Greek side other to Turkish side, boarding at the same time from adjacent gates... Great move British Airways!
The plane they should have gotten on got delayed for many hours because they had a missing passenger so had to remove the stowed luggage[0] after giving up waiting. However they somehow didn't catch the extra passenger in the other plane.
Now this wasn't too long after the tumultuous events[1] in 1974, and so tension was still high between the two sides. So when my family member naively tried to cross the border to get to where they were going, they were assumed to be a spy and got held for interrogation.
After a couple of days of really intense interrogation they got to cross the buffer zone[2], being told in no uncertain terms never ever to come back to the Turkish side.
[0]: edit I'm pretty sure this was before the Lockerbie bombing, in any case I do recall my parents telling me they were worried about the "surprise luggage" being a bomb.
Flying to Cyprus continues to be exciting to this day, by the way: There are two "competing" air traffic control radio stations [1], which I really wish was just a nonsensical term, but which is apparently a phenomenon not unique to Cyprus [2].
( although I have heard that there is a workaround whereby flights, typically charter-flights, will 'fly' to an airport in Southern Türkiye, and then vary their flight-plan to redirect to Ercan airport instead).
This isn't as sketchy as it sounds. There is an official procedure for "in flight replanning" that's pre-approved by local aviation authorities.
It can be used to stretch the range of a fight in case of good weather while having options for worst case weather. For example you can plan Tel Aviv to Antwerp, while selling Tel Aviv to Amsterdam (this is on the edge for maximum range of a 737 with full capacity), then re-plan to Amsterdam if all conditions meet the rules.
There are two parts of fuel planning that make this work. The first is that you need for example 5% of the trip fuel for contingency. That's 5% of the full 8 hour trip on takeoff but that becomes 5% of the 1 hour (past Antwerp to Amsterdam) at the re-planning moment.
The second is diversion fuel to fly to an alternate airport in case you cannot land at the destination. At the departure moment weather for the destination is more uncertain (because it's still 8 hours into the future). That means your chances of diverting are higher and if it's a big storm system you can't be diverting to a very nearby airport (Rotterdam is 10 min flight away and fine for a 737). So you need to plan for holding and a diversion to something an hour away.
Now in flight you get near Antwerp, you're only an hour from Amsterdam (where you really want to go), you have accurate destination weather and you re-plan that one hour. With Rotterdam as an alternate (in case the airport closes for a non-weather related reason). Contingency is 5% of that 1 hour, and typically you will have saved some fuel in the first 7 hours due to shortcuts because it's "plan for the worst" at departure time but reality is more favourable. Now your calculations for the 1 hour extra all meet the rules, so you go there.
Maybe 1% of the cases with very bad weather and exceptional circumstances you may end up in Antwerp instead of Amsterdam. Then you re-fuel there and make the short hop to Amsterdam afterwards. An hour or 2 delay on a bad weather day isn't really unheard of for passengers.
> you can plan Tel Aviv to Antwerp, while selling Tel Aviv to Amsterdam
I think I'm missing something – what if somebody actually wants to get off in Amsterdam? Does the ticket come with a little asterisk saying "you're likely to end up in Antwerp"? Or are you talking about chartered or private flights?
The flight plan formally calls for a stop in Antwerp just to refuel. If that happened the plane would land at Antwerp and top up the tanks with the passengers on board before continuing to Amsterdam so from the passengers perspective they're always getting to their destination but sometimes the arrival is delayed for a fuel stop.
I personally would be annoyed if I booked a non-stop that was expected to have s top by default but I guess if it works out a high enough portion of the time it doesn't really matter
The passengers don't know about the flight plan. The screen at the gate and tickets just say Tel Aviv to Amsterdam. But the formal flightplan says Tel Aviv to Antwerp with Amsterdam as the destination alternate.
You go to Amsterdam 99% of the time, only when the weather is bad you could end up in Antwerp. But that happens to "normal" non-replanned flights as well, if weather at the destination is bad they could also divert to Antwerp.
I always secretly hope I get on the wrong plane and end up somewhere fun. It does seem like it can happen from time to time since Ryanair now always informs "if you are on the wrong plane tell us!".
I once (accidentally) tried this when travelling around Australia many years ago. The gate changed at the last minute and I didn’t notice, so tried to board the wrong place.
As soon as they scanned my boarding pass all hell broke loose. Flashing red lights, sirens going off, the whole works. They were very nice about it, but yeah, that particular system made it impossible not to notice.
There's no mention of ID, just boarding pass. I'm pretty sure similar checks in NZ would catch wrong plane boarding (there's usually someone checking boarding passes on the plane too), with no ID check anywhere.
I mean that I'm surprised that there was a fuss over boarding at the wrong gate.
If you had a ticket, regardless of the name on it, you could walk into the airport, go to the gate, and get on a flight. It's a different situation, but things were generally pretty casual, and I just don't recall there being anything dramatic about a simple gate mixup.
Interestingly I just watched a funny sketch video about the difference between Australian and US Airport security [1]. Definitely not a serious comparison, I doubt that Australian airports are nearly as lax as the video makes it seem.
I mean, the passing the bag through without scanning is facetious, but Australian (domestic) security is much lighter than the US. You don’t need ID, you don’t need a ticket, and until recently it was only metal detectors everywhere rather than full body scanners.
Also, it wouldn’t be uncommon to joke around (although there are some hard-asses); if they legitimately did recognise a YouTube, I could see them getting a selfie together.
If you want to go someplace fun, just book a ticket to someplace fun.
I actually got in the wrong plane once. But I was already heading someplace fun, and I'm glad I didn't end up going somewhere I didn't want to go.
I was in another country catching a connecting flight. My gate was changed but I didn't notice. I got in the plane. They let me. I was sitting in my seat when a gate agent came and got me.
A friend of mine runs a small tech conference every year in Portland, Maine. (You probably know where this is going.) One of the early years of the conference someone booked a ticket to Portland, Oregon which is probably the more expected locale for a tech conference. Forget if they actually flew there or if they just had to change the ticket.
San Jose is the really confusing one imho. San Jose international in Cabo (SJD) just south of the California border and San Jose international (SJC) in California are spitting distance globally speaking so if flying from a third country you really need to make sure you got the right one as ticket prices alone wont give it away.
That's a dispatch screw-up before departure, not a pilot.
That plane will have been on a valid flight plan but to the wrong place, there is no way for the flight crew to go to a completely different place than the flight plan. Because the air traffic control computers also have the flight plan. So their instructions are going towards the filed destination. Any discrepancy would be noticed on both sides very quickly because you get instructions that don't fit the plan.
The one thing the crew can screw up during the flight is landing at an airport right next to the destination when on a visual approach. By visually confusing the two airports. There are procedures to avoid it, but it still happens.
Yes and some airport/approaches have a high enough risk that there is a warning. Düsseldorf for example has a box with something like "Don't confuse Essen airport X miles north-east when approaching runway 23" drawn on their approach as a caution. Because you're flying right over the top of that other airport, with the same runway direction.
The pilot is like the captain on the boat, it may be someone else’s fault but it’s his responsibility.
(I think this is why many pilots say on the intercoms before pushback as to where the plane is going, if they say Birmingham and the entire plane bursts into screaming and crying, then they know … they got it right ;) ).
We had a company executive get-together outside of London a few years ago, so many of us were flying out the same evening on different flights from Boston. I knew my ticket was Delta and on an A330, so when we all left the lounge to go to our flights, I glanced outside, saw the Delta A330 and the sign that said London, so I queued up and kept chatting with colleagues.
Boarding scan rejected my boarding pass with a red light and loud buzz and I had to walk-of-shame in front of my colleagues down to my actual gate (which was leaving around an hour and a half later, IIRC).
I've nearly done this as well. Late night stop over in Singapore, went to the wrong gate, flight attendent waved me through despite the pass 'not scanning' and it was only a senior person who waved me down to check that stopped me - I was already strolling to the flight.
This is the importance of working right each time. If the digital scanner makes mistakes even 1% of the time, the gate checkers will learn to ignore it when it squeaks.
Also the "not scanning because you are not holding it right" should be a very different error from the "this did scan and no, you are at the wrong gate".
Had a flight where the pilots on multiple announcements said the wrong destination and I was about to jump off. I knew I went through the right gate but definitely confusing. Pilots caught their mistake and had a good laugh.
I've thought up this exact scam before while standing in line to board a flight and watching people being cavalier with their boarding passes.
I suspect others have successfully pulled it off before and this guy was the first to get caught because of a full flight.
My back seat driver solution: have cameras that takes a picture of the person presenting the boarding pass, the shutter is triggered by the pass scanner. If a pass is scanned twice, bring up the photo of the person who scanned it the first time and grab them. But it's a whole lot of tech to solve a problem that probably rarely happens.
You don't need that much tech. When the second copy of a boarding pass scans, you double check with that person, maybe there's a good reason (scanned pass, but had to leave the line for some reason). If it doesn't make sense, ask the flight attendants to audit seats. Also summon security.
The suspect is on the plane and can't easily leave, presuming the real passenger is the one who presents second.
But the tech would have helped in this case: the flight attendent saw that the pass was already scanned, "assumed it was a glitch" and let the real ticket holder on. If that system showed a quick pic of the person who previously boarded, I doubt they would have done this.
If the system worked as you propose, but regularly glitches, it would show someone's picture when it glitched. The check-in staff wouldn't see anything weird about this particular person's photo: he's not otherwise noteworthy. Maybe it would be the person with the seat number from a previous flight.
The attendant assumed it was a glitch because it usually is a glitch. The official policy is that there are no glitches and that the staff member should have called security and investigated the plane. The actual policy from middle management is "if you do this you will end up calling security 30 times a day because our systems suck and half our flights would be delayed, so just use your judgment until the technical issue is fixed".
Here they really do need a technical solution to a technical problem. Improve the tech so it has false positives on less than say 0.1% of flights. Then you can enforce the official policy and discipline staff members and/or their managers if they don't follow it.
The glitches wouldn’t be arbitrary like that. There is no need to assume a data corruption issue or anything like that to explain the glitches. It’s much more likely in my opinion, that the system regularly receives bad input due to people behaving in ways it wasn’t able to track. For example not scanning, double scanning because the attendant was moving the scanner around rapidly, people needing to exit the line due to one member of a larger party (eg a child or spouse) having a problem after part of the group had already been scanned.
As I understand it, the data is linked in the background in some airports, i.e. they just check if there's any boarding pass in your name (and presumably date of birth to disambiguate; most if not all airlines collect it nowadays) in the system.
They do if you have multiple valid boarding passes leaving that airport the same day. The flow is present ID -> machine says "multiple flights, scan bp for one of them"
Exactly. Delta makes it easy when flying with multiple people to accidentally scan someone else in your parties pass. Happened to be before where my sister used my ticket and boarded but when I scanned it flagged that it was used. I just pulled out my id and they verified. Someone eventually figured it out.
On all flights I have taken the flight attendants count the passengers on board before taxiing and check the lavatories. This method wouldn't have worked even with available free seats.
Just had to go back to the gate the other day because the manifest didn’t match the count. I can see them overlooking this with flippant flight attendants, especially on smaller flights, but on my flight we were next in line for take off when they sent us back to the gate. So we almost made it to the sky. Also, I don’t know what happened, they checked one seat and then we were off. Missed connecting flight because of it.
This is also for weight and balance / performance calculations. If the calculations are done for 150 passengers and you count only 149 (or 151), you can't legally take off without new paperwork.
That just reminded me... This actually happened to me. I scanned my boarding pass to enter security at Heathrow and it didn't work. I had to a special desk and they had a picture of someone who had apparently already gone through security using my pass. I didn't recognise the face at all. I completely forgot about it until this moment. I guess I was allowed through after showing ID etc. At the time I probably thought it was a "glitch" but maybe someone photographed my pass? I'm always quite careful with stuff like that, though, so not sure.
In Europe all flights require you to show an ID at the gate. Usually they just throw a quick look (no big delay), but something like this is harder to pull off. Always amazed how much there is talk about "security" in US (TSA, border control, all 3 letter agencies, etc.) and then basic stuff is done a bit ... lax.
> You don't normally need to show your passport or ID when crossing the internal borders of the Schengen area. However, all Schengen area countries (see below) are allowed to reintroduce temporary border controls in extraordinary circumstances, for example, in case of a threat to public policy or national security.
This is not about borders. It is about the rules of the air company. Any place where the ticket is nominal can (and in my opinion should) ask for an ID. At least to prevent for example people hording tickets and reselling them.
Sure, but in your comment above you claimed that this is already the case for all flights in Europe, which is just not true and different from your opinion that this is what ought to be happening.
Did not know this about Sweeden but in most other cities I flown they did a quick look at the id as well (ok, sometimes they did not pay attention but the intention was there).
Only for flights that leave the Schengen zone. No ID required for Amsterdam to Paris or something like that.
The reason they ask on a fight to the US or Asia or something is that the airline is responsible to bring the passenger back to their origin if they don't have the required paperwork to enter the destination country.
All airlines I took within Schengen zone in the last 5 years or so required IDs matching the boarding pass at the gates. On some you aren't 100% positive they read them correctly, on some the attendant is reading out loud names on both the pass/computer and the passeport, I guess to force themselves to really check.
Various companies but mostly cheap ones: Easyjet, Vueling, Transavia, Ryanair...
The border check is different from the airline check. Border checks are imposed by the states. Gate checks are imposed by airlines also to prevent for examples people buying tickets in advance and reselling them at higher prices to other persons (airlines prefer to do that themselves).
In US, quite often on international flights now they just use camera to scan you and let you in without even presenting the boarding pass. It’s not rolled out everywhere yet, but it’s pretty surreal to use.
it isn't the false-positives you'd be worried about, but the false-false-positives. IE, George and Bill are twins. George has booked a flight but the face scan says it's Bill trying to get on the plane.
That's not how those systems work. They just try to see if the face on the camera matches the one associated with the ticket, same as what airline employees do. It is "match" or "no match". The system doesn't know nor care who Bill is.
I'm not aware of any EU regulation requiring ID checks at the gate, and accordingly this depends on the country. Most leave it up to the airline, I think.
I've flown inside Schengen without ever showing my ID at any point of the trip many times.
This doesn't really make a difference. You just show ID & boarding pass instead of just a boarding pass. You already have your ID on you. It's literally just a case of taking an extra thing out of your pocket.
This is how it works in Europe and it never even crossed my mind that it could be annoying.
It's not really a big deal if someone sneaks on board, therefore, no reason to burden millions of flyers every day with additional checks. Also, you may well not have ID on you. Maybe you don't like to carry it. Maybe you forgot your wallet. Maybe you don't even have one. Who cares?
Most companies tell you the name of the tickets you purchase must absolutely match the name on your ID, so no you can't just not carry it if you are flying.
So it really depends on airlines AND departure/destination laws. Like if you are flying in or out of Spain, I am 100% positive you need your ID.
I fly out of Stuttgart, Germany, with Eurowings a lot and if it wasn't for the payment process, I could fly completely anonymous, i.e. even under a fake name. Not possible to pay in cash AFAIK, and having a credit card or a checking account under a fake name is much more difficult.
If I even have a bag to check, I present the boarding pass to the machine. After that, there is no thumbprint check, no ID check, no photographs, nothing. Even internationally (within Schengen).
The thumbprint is optional at Trondheim I think. You can use your credit card instead. It's just a convenience for the traveller. There are no boarding passes.
Often you only have one acceptable ID on you and if you lose that because you're fumbling around with things at 6am in the morning, you can be screwed.
After somehow losing my driver's license one morning between the curb and the airport door--no idea how to this day--I always use my Global Entry card when I can to present ID because it's essentially a spare ID.
So, yeah, I prefer not to present ID any more than I have to.
I always assumed that scanning a boarding pass means it's marked as "used" and would flag up if scanned again. Or at the very least, previous scans would immediately show up so the attendant can verify.
What I wrote was a bit unclear: They want to avoid that you buy a low cost ticket and resell it to somebody else a day before the flight (because you either cannot make it or because you want to make money).
As is OSL / Oslo Gardermoen, but on occasion they will use the PA to find late pax, at least on international flights. Presumably there's more paperwork if there's a no-show, I don't know.
Anyway, sitting in a bar there a few years ago, waiting for my flight, I hear a series of progressively more strongly worded announcements for pax X and Y to get to the gate or else.
Noone shows. Then the 'This is absolutely, positively, make no mistake about it final call for flight such-and-such, gate closes in 30 seconds.'-announcement.
At which point the two men at the table next to me get up and stroll over to the nearmost gate.
I almost fist-pumped when the gate attendant just looked at them (eyes ablaze!) and said 'Sorry, gate just closed!' then proceeded to inform whoever was listening on the VHF that pax X and Y were no-shows, presumably to have their luggage located and offloaded.
I once was one of 10 unrelated paxes that missed their flight because announcements were very quiet and boarding window was very short. Not sure whether 10% of the flight manifest were all entitled or the gate attendant was mean.
Indeed! Just a quick question to satisfy my curiosity - seeing as you fly out of Trondheim, work with embedded systems and have a background in physics, would you happen to be named Jostein and have a dark past frequenting Omega Verksted and occasionally also Akademisk Radioklubb c. 2000?
Horrible airlines like ryanair and wizzair id check because they monetize typos (made a typo? Real risk of refused boarding, and changing the name costs money).
I usually fly KLM/AF and I get id checked on less than 5% of the flights I take within the Schengen zone.
This would seem to only work with unsuspecting gate agents that assume that an "already boarded" message must be due to an accidental double-scan (which is presumably the cause 99% of the time), not somebody different already having boarded using a copy of that same boarding pass.
One simple solution could be to show a different kind of warning for a double scan that's immediately repeated, and one that had at least one other pass scanned in between, requiring greater scrutiny.
The way it works in Europe is you scan the QR code, gate agent gets a green light and the name of the passenger, and checks that both your name and photo on your passport match.
There is a much simpler solution: check ID of the passenger, verify name & photo, plus take note of the seat number. If somebody comes with same seat number, investigate.
Thats not universally true, probably not even mostly true.
I must have taken a few hundred flights from Schiphol with KLM and was never id-checked on flights within Schengen. There are airports when checks are performed but far from all of them.
> My back seat driver solution: have cameras that takes a picture of the person presenting the boarding pass, the shutter is triggered by the pass scanner. If a pass is scanned twice, bring up the photo of the person who scanned it the first time and grab them. But it's a whole lot of tech to solve a problem that probably rarely happens.
Or do what is done all over Europe, even for domestic flights: check the passport at the same time as the boarding pass at the gate.
Some international flights have face scanners at the gate. Not sure if it's to take a photo in the event of an issue or an actual scan and comparison against your stored ID, but the length of the process (a few seconds) suggests the latter.
It's some combo of the latter. It's been a few years, but the last time I went through Heathrow, my face was scanned at passport control (arriving from US) and then again at boarding (connection to Glasgow). The two photos didn't match enough and I was asked to stand aside while the gate agent figured out how to proceed (pull out passport for review).
[at least that's my recollection of what happened]
If it glitches just ask for photo ID. Why add all the complexity and inconvenience of taking a photo of every passenger when they’re already all required to have photo ID?
In 1990s my grandfather accidentally boarded the plane flying to Frankfurt instead of Dusseldorf and got there. They were departing nearly at the same time, so it was a matter of walk to a wrong plane. He just checked after boarding with flight attendants that it’s indeed THE flight to Germany. Thankfully he had enough relatives all over Germany, so someone could pick him up there too.
Unimaginable situation today because of ID checks.
Still quite possible, just boarded a flight that had two gates past the final check, you could (not entirely easily, but quite accidentally) switch if both were active.
Unless Southwest is wildly different than other airlines, the behavior of people you give F&F standby passes to potentially reflects on you as an employee. Not sure if getting in trouble with another airline instead of your employer would mitigate that, but my guess is whoever gave him the buddy pass caught some flack at work.
No; those were retired in the wake of 9/11 when boarding passes became required to get through security. After that, the logistics of at-gate checkin didn’t work anymore and Southwest started issuing disposable paper boarding passes outside security like every other airline.
For those that aren’t aware, this is the origin of Southwest’s quirky boarding process. They required you to check in at the gate, and each gate had a set of reusable plastic boarding cards with sequential numbers— You were handed the next card when you checked on and gave it back as you got on the plane, so that it could be reused for the next flight.
Everyone boarded the plane in the order they arrived for the flight without needing to stand in a strict queue while they waited. If the flight you were planning to take was full, you would be first in line for the next one which was often scheduled for less than half an hour later for their core routes.
Imagine what kind of sleazeball you have to be, to take an expensive gift with your friend's name on it, and use it to commit a federal crime.
That said, what's the point of the buddy pass system, if it's not guaranteed? Who goes to the airport, through security and checkin, thinking "maybe I'll fly today, maybe not, maybe I'll fly somewhere else, whatever's available, you know?"
I was once on a plane to Munich, having just boarded. At some pint the stewardess asked "who is flying to Munich?".
"Welllll everyone I guess" I thought and raised my hand.
The plane was to Amsterdam and they mis-boarded three people (including me). Apparently the scanner something something and pointed us to the wrong entrance.
Sounds like systems worked as designed but the Delta employee didn’t do anything about the tricker scanning as a duplicate boarding event. That raised questions of it they failed to follow a defined protocol or if the scanning system was just prone to be a bit flaky (eg consistently double scanning someone’s pass in quick succession and thus throwing out false alarms for dupe boarding that agents just ignored as annoying alarms).
All the alternatives I can think of are extremely time-intensive - you'd have to go back to everyone who already scanned in and check their id against their boarding pass. That would add significant delays in taking off, which could cost the airline a lot of money in ripple effects throughout the day and will certainly cost the gate agents a lot of hassle and ill-will from customers.
It's a good question as to whether they have a protocol for this; if the scanner is prone to making mistakes even 1 in a 1000 times, that's every few flights, several times a day. It wouldn't be worth it to the airline to have a time-intensive protocol to check.
I think surfacing additional information would help increase confidence in the system when it raises a problem.
For example, keep a running passengerCount (or rather display it since it must(?) exist).
If someone has a copied pass, their screen can show:
Current Passenger Count 10
This Pass Last Scanned at 5
If the fraudster & legitimate passenger are back-to-back, that might add some confusion for the agent so they'd need a good way to display this. They can call out to the last person to come back to clear up confusion.
If the fraudster was much earlier, they'd have to go find them. Maybe take a picture of each passenger during pass-scan.
Or simpler: this would be simplified by using Steffen Method boarding [1]: you should know exactly which seat matches a given passenger count number.
> All the alternatives I can think of are extremely time-intensive - you'd have to go back to everyone who already scanned in and check their id against their boarding pass. That would add significant delays in taking off, which could cost the airline a lot of money in ripple effects throughout the day and will certainly cost the gate agents a lot of hassle and ill-will from customers.
I've had to do exactly that before. Whole plane: deplane, re-scan boarding passes, re-board.
Somehow we had one too many people on the plane on a full flight, exactly like this scenario. Of course it was the one guy that was making so much noise about "who gonna get in trouble" and "this [is] like a reality show."
In Australia, at most domestic airports, you can enter the secure area without a boarding pass. For example, as I saw on the last domestic flight I caught, you can give a teary farewell right before they board.
Also, in Australia at most domestic airports and for most airlines they don’t check ID when checking in or when boarding.
I found this odd and happened to be talking to a friend a few days later who is a travel agent, has been one for 20+ years, and knows a lot about systems here and in other countries. He said that very few domestic terminals in other countries allow a person into the secure area without a boarding pass. (It used to be fairly common.)
> you can enter the secure area without a boarding pass
I never understood why this isn't the case everywhere. You can always just buy a cheap ticket (Ryanair sells seats for as little as €15) and not board. The barrier to entry is so low that I can't imagine it accomplishes much from a security point of view.
When you book a US flight ticket there’s a $5 fee for the hassle of getting you through airport security. If you allowed anyone to get into the secure area you would have to charge people that fee to make it back.
Although some US airports do some version of this where you go to a desk on the insecure side of the airport and you register your ID and then you can get through security without a boarding pass so you can go to the shops and spend money there and pay for expensive airport parking. Probably a good opportunity for planespotters
Yeah, the whole airport security fee thing is a bit of a pain, but it's all about maintaining security measures. The option to get through security without a boarding pass is pretty niche but cool for those who want to access the airport amenities or do some planespotting. On the topic of airport parking, it's notoriously expensive, but there are ways to save a bit. Sites like parkingaccess can help you find better deals than the standard airport rates. It's always surprising how much you can save with a little research. Most people seem to agree that looking for alternative parking options is the way to go to avoid those steep airport parking fees.
I was passing through NZ a few months ago and noticed this, wound up chatting to a security guy about this. They’re apparently (slowly) trying to change this?
It used to be well known in the USA before they changed security that if you knew the airlines and flight patterns you could fly for free, by just getting on non full flights.
Of the plane wasn’t full, they’d often not care, or they’d be lax about it. The “fumble in my pockets with people behind me until they just wave you on” kind of thing.
Pretty funny, and makes me think the ticketing system pretty much worked. Yeah he was able to get on the plane, but the system correctly flagged the second time the pass was scanned, and once seats started filling up he was discovered
He was only discovered once the plane was taxiing, which doesn't sound like it pretty much worked - if the flight hadn't been full, he may well have got away with it.
1. The ID should be checked along (and preferably) before the boarding pass is scanned. Most airlines do this; so this is an oversight from the agent to "quickly" let people through.
2. The agent was also lazy to investigate the situation and just assumed it was a "computer glitch". Again, probably breaking procedure.
This could have been worse but I wonder what's the point of all the security theater that the US goes through when simple security procedures are not strictly followed.
Did you know that your boarding pass is a life insurance?
Back in the 90s in Argentina, nobody checked id for national flights. Was common to give ticket to a colleague were missing a meeting (this particular route was almost like a bus)
Then a plane crashed at takeoff and everyone died. Some people got lucky because they gave the ticket to a colleague.
Turns the family of said colleagues could not get a death certificate, recover bodies or get insurance as they “officially” weren’t on the plane nor insured.
Incidentally the theme of a very nice dutch song, guy dies in rental car, burns out, wrong person identified, person is suddenly free, enjoys is, but is he brave, is he fleeing? Emotional ride for person. One of my fav songs, some beautiful sentences like "... And of all his boyhood dreams, only growing old was achieved..." [0] Over the years/decades of their career these artists return to the story of Herman (the main person). Absolutely beautiful (ultra-Dutch videoclip btw, it's how my grandparents lived).
Also, this assumes the checks are actually performed - which is a compute intensive operation for a human (names in various languages, etc). I once accidentally swapped passports with my wife, and we both boarded without questions. We dont share last names, and, of course, dont look much alike. Its bad security to rely on tired people doing annoying repeatable tasks where the risk of something going wrong is so low.
On international flights, if an airline transports somebody who is rejected by the destination for not having the proper visas etc, they are heavily fined. So airlines are strongly incentivized to triple-check passengers and their documentation.
Not really, no, it's just one more thing to go wrong and for me to have to dig out of my pockets. I'm happy for things to move along more efficiently, airplane processes are slow and annoying enough as it is. I don't care if some other guy got on the wrong flight, intentionally or not. That's his business.
How do you get 2x?
I'd say you slow down boarding by something between 0.00x% and 0.0y%, since it takes an extra couple of seconds to do that, at least with the German system.
I'm intrigued about the system you are envisioning that creates the extra 100% delay.
Maybe so, but that has nothing to do with the gate check-in.
The bottleneck is at boarding the plane and seating. Passengers stand in line on the jetway after they check in at the gate. The only reason gatecheck is rushed is to reduce amount of staff-time required at the airport. It doesn't get the plane boarded more quickly.
Unless the ticket was bought by a stolen identity and then the boarding pass handed over to a person on a terrorist watchlist who boards with his genuine, mismatching ID
I don't think the watchlists really do anything. Checking your ID against the boarding pass is just yield management for the airlines. (Compare the cost of a full fare economy ticket 45 minutes before the flight to what some desperate person would sell it to you for, knowing that they either use it or lose it.)
The don't actually check boarding passes at security in the US in my recent experience. Though your ID may be tied to your ticket in the computer system in some manner.
Security has a cost. Not just with computers but with airports and society as a whole. Making everything trustless and bulletproof encumbers everything and wastes many resources, including the most precious one - time.
Boarding time is a big factor in the cost structure of airlines. If they have to check ID of everyone who boards, it’s a lot slower. And in fact European airlines have a much slower turnaround time than Southwest. There’s already an ID check before you get airside, so another check during boarding is not needed for security. If all it accomplishes is revealing this edge case, which can be deterred by detection and enforcement after the fact, is it really worth making everyone wait and increasing costs?
> And in fact European airlines have a much slower turnaround time than Southwest
Comparing apples to apples, Ryanair (low cost, optimised to hell, 737 only, 3rd in the world by amount of passengers carried in front of Southwest in 4th for 2022) has a turnaround time of around 25 minutes, meanwhile Southwest's is around 35 minutes (official figures of what the airline says for both).
Many airports I have been through do a facial scan during the first ID check and then have cameras at any other point the boarding pass is needed. If your face doesn't match the one stored against your boarding pass an hour or two ago then you have to seek assistance from an employee who will hopefully find out why that is.
If somebody was trying to do something serious, they’d have some kind of ID that would get them through the actual security checkpoint. It’s only this bizarre scheme (that didn’t even work) where checking ID again would matter.
If we’re making an analogy to internet security, it’s like when websites use JavaScript to disable standard input into the password field. Just a pointless waste of everyone’s time.
It’s more about how many planes you can get through the expensive, scarce gates you have in a day. Those staff could be boarding another batch of paying customers instead of checking IDs.
It's not an "oversight from the crew". Checking ID at the gate is not a thing in the US for domestic flights, and that is a very good thing for boarding time overhead.
ID isn't checked for internal flights within New Zealand, and I note other posts here saying it's not for Australia as well. European seems 50/50. So doesn't seem like a consistent policy to check ID for interal flights.
> This could have been worse but I wonder what's the point of all the security theater that the US goes through when simple security procedures are not strictly followed.
But he did regularly pass through security. So not really a security breach IMO.
Flight crew have other things to do then count 200-odd squirming people and are flight attendants supposed to memorize unoccupied seats or carry a clipboard up and down the aisles?
A head count is often done with a simple mechanical clicker by the flight attendants right at the plane's doors and/or during the check walk looking for seat belts and unstowed luggage during taxiing. It takes no additional time at all.
Any pilot should have an actual count of the souls on board, it can become a question of life and death in an emergency situation. Would you want to be the one left behind trapped in a burning wreck because "all 200" passengers on the list have been declared clear of it - with the blind passenger taking your spot?
I'm aware this is a made up scenario that probably would never occur even in the event. Take it more as food for thought why knowing the SOB might be more than unnecessary theatre.
I'm really astonished by a lot of responses in this thread, seeing how people that are forced to take off their shoes while waiting in line ay the airport keep on defending willful negligence at seemingly every other point in the process.
Yes, having a full count of people on board seems like a low effort necessary action to be taking especially for emergency scenarios. I assume if the passenger count doesn't match the expected count, especially in the case of a double passenger scan it should flag a more extensive audit.
That's why ID's get checked at the boarding gate, so this trick wouldn't have been possible at many airports around europe at least. Not checking ID's seems somewhat irresponsible from a security perspective.
It would have worked in Europe just fine because just like in US no one checks IDs on domestic flights. At least here in UK if you're flying inside the UK then no one looks at your ID at any point, you just need a ticket(flew like this literally last month, at no point has anyone asked me for any id)
I've always been checked for id, even for local flights as well (SXB, LYS, ETZ, LIS, BCN, MLH/BZL/EAP). Airlines were Air France and EasyJet.
MLH/BZL/EAP is fun because you kinda keep going back and forth across borders a few times as you walk around, and depending on where you "come from" the destination country can have slightly different requirements for entering upon arrival (which is checked at the gate on departure, I did get a random customs check on arrival once when crossing the swiss/french border). Not a problem on the happy path but could get hairy if you get into trouble I guess.
I think in France it may depend on "plan Vigipirate" levels as well.
How is that irresponsible for security? Everyone on the secure side of the airport has been secured in the same way. ID checkin at gate is revenue management, not security.
IDs are rarely checked here in EU, why so? Or maybe rarely is exaggerated, but 50/50 at least. What security issue arises besides security theater, that's a different checkpoint.
What I do not understand, what is creative here? If he had a buddy pass, and was denied because of a full plane, how could he hope for an empty seat? That sounds super dumb?
2nd I don't understand: The scanning at the gate doesn't check for tickets scanned twice? It marks people off, not? I thought that is how they call sometimes missing people out? So why were there no problems when he or the real owner scanned the ticket a second time?
I think the crew counts people and then checks lavatory as part of the procedure. I have an old gizmo that is like a pocket watch but serves to count (clicker) things. I have seen many airlines doing this procedure..
For safety reasons, passengers need to be seated and buckled in during takeoff. So you can just verify everyone is seated, then after that check that the lavatories are empty. If a lavatory is occupied, make that person take their seat.
Now you've verified there are enough seats for everyone.
Huh? The flight attendants would obviously unlock them again as soon as the plane was up in the air and stable. It's just during the take-off process itself that you need to know no one's in there.
No - per the article he emerged from the bathroom and was walking around thinking he would be able to find a seat. He might have made it if he actually just stayed in the bathroom.
Why is the press somehow making this out to be such a security matter? Seems like this is just a simple case of theft in the amount of three or $400. I failed to see how there’s any real security issue here. The man went through security his bags were checked, ID was checked to ensure he wasn’t on a no fly list.
This seems like a petty crime.
Worse the newscaster has to go and say it’s *our* problem that our “private information” is being taken. Sorry he was stealing a $400 flight from the airline. Don’t try to pin that on the port customers. It should be of no concern to us. If someone steals my barcode what do I care? I’m still going to get on the plane. It’s their crappy system that permits this, please don’t burden the consumer with managing your security.
FWIW Ticketmaster barcodes can’t be screenshotted (they’re dynamic). Seems the airlines should just improve their tech.
It’s amazing what a smile can do to get people to drop their guard.
The basis for every con. Person here has potential in security :)
The only thing he fucked up was lack of research into the flight he was sneaking on. Probably could have looked up flight number to determine if there were any empty seats
I wonder how much experience he has flying commercial. The seat maps aren't particularly accurate because some are under gate control, or some are inop, etc. He could have probably estimated the chances of being at capacity based on the standby list and just the general attitudes of people hanging around the gate. A fully sold flight is almost certainly going to have standbys hovering to get confirmed. That should've been the clue.
On my flight to Punta Arenas from Santiago, two people got on who were supposed to get on the next flight. They just let them fly and had the luggage delivered to the destination.
His friend who gave him the buddy pass is going to get into trouble for no reason now. This seems wholly unnecessary. My wife would fly standby all the time and they'll usually find some way to get on some plane at some time. It just won't be ideal. No reason to be this desperate.
The article mentions that he did not lock the door while in the lavatory. Once the flight took off, he then went to the other lavatory where he did lock the door.
But that‘s not what happened according to the article.
> The problem is, there were no empty seats on the flight. So when he emerged from the lavatory and the plane began taxiing, flight attendants realized something was wrong, and the plane returned to the gate.
On one hand that’s pretty creative, thinking outside the box, so to speak. On the other hand the flight looked like it was full, so how did they expect the whole thing would go? Just hog the bathroom the whole flight.
Wonder if they will start to mandate some extra checks before boarding. The case high profile enough that some will be compelled to “respond”. Maybe everyone is forced to show their ID before boarding?
Showing IDs would work, but also training employees not to assume a warning is a glitch would have prevented him from boarding. If they took the time verify that the original person had already scanned their ticket, they would have noticed something was wrong.
EDIT: this is assuming that the warning is not routinely ignored (i.e. there's actually a bug in the system and it would slow down boarding time since it happens so frequently.) If that were the case... they should fix their system lol
It might be a generic "beep" error that a dirty sensor or paper would normally indicate. People get used to false positives quickly and start ignoring them.
Maybe it was a different alarm with a distinctive indicate that "I read this fine, but it's a duplicate" and they would stop and start checking the ID.
I wonder how quickly companies move to let the employee go after something like this. Do they offer to pay for a lawyer, or just quickly drop them as soon as there is an investigation started.
They could probably make a joke about "our accountants know how to think outside the box" but that probably wouldn't go very well at all.
If that were the case, I expect it would show differently. There was a whole thing in Seattle where someone got into accident that left their passenger dead, they escaped the hospital and headed back to their home country, while their employer kept them on the roster under "administrative leave."
I remember in the past you had to show id at the gate as well as at security.
The way they do it now I think you can show up with 2 tickets, one in your name for getting through security and another under a fake name for where you actually want to go.
Pop into a bathroom behind security, do a costume change to confuse security camera forensics after the fact, and you get away clean.
And if you somehow manage to get your real name boarding pass scanned but not get on the plane (I don't have a foolproof way to do this, but it's probably possible with some luck) then they will spend a lot of time looking for you at the destination you never went to.
Not the case for internal/domestic flights in New Zealand, and I presume it's similar for other countries. Only on international flights do I see regaular requests for passports for understandable reasons.
I love how half the Europeans are insisting that they get ID checked all the time and the other half say they’ve never been checked in the Schezen area.
In the USA I’ve been on some flights where they just glanced at the boarding pass which obviously isn’t checking anything against a database.
I’ve noticed a fair few comments here and elsewhere starting with “In Europe…” and then extrapolating from the commenter’s experience living in a single EU country.
Maybe that’s a testament to how successful harmonisation of national rules has been across the EU. But it doesn’t seem to apply to ID checks.
I suspect it has much more to do with airline policies (which are influenced both by the gate country and the airline’s country) than with Europe directly.
So, if I understand this right, the buddy pass would have let him take an empty seat anyway. So wouldn't this make it quite obvious that there are no empty seats?
Points for creativity, sure, but it seems like he should have foreseen this.
That's a super creative setup, and one that came surprisingly close to working. Do kinda wonder if Delta will rethink their system a bit now though, given the barcode based system is seemingly trivial to bypass.
They noted in the video that the system did say that the ticket had already been scanned.
It probably happens now and then that a ticket is accidentally scanned twice and so this message wouldn’t seem that out of place, and so they probably proceeded as normal without thinking that someone else really had already boarded with the same boarding pass.
I would think adding a simple timestamp to the message would be helpful instead of just a Boolean “has been scanned” type of flag. With the timestamp you could at least say something like “this ticket was previously scanned at <time>.” Then from that message you would know whether it was an accidental double scan (the time being within seconds of now) or whether some time had passed, which I would hope would raise an eyebrow.
Edit: I have no idea what the actual messaging looks like. It could indeed have a timestamp. I’m just hypothesizing.
Even that’s going to have many more false positives and be annoying which will cause the attendants to be tempted to hit the “it’s fine” button.
For example, I suspect a decent number are couples/families that print multiple copies of boarding passes and two accidentally try to use the same one.
And like most security measures, humans are the weak link. The scanning system did mark the barcode as already used/invalid, but the staff assumed it was a glitch and let them on.
These sorts of issues aren't always the software's fault. Sometimes it's human error.
I've been prevented from boarding because the airline sent all the party tickets as a single PDF and my confused family members all scanned the first barcode they saw.
When things fail, we gain little by punishing the person who was operating the system. Instead, we must ask, "why did the system allow this failure?" Fix that root cause, because the operator is not the root cause here.
Why did the system securing the plane let the operator override the error and allow an unauthorized passenger on the plane?
Should be easy enough, UI shows the picture of the guy who scanned the first ticket and system tells operator you go and check his ticket. If you can't find him on the plane he's hiding in the bathroom, call security to get him out.
Because software is full of bugs, false assumptions, and ambiguities, people make mistakes, information doesn't transfer perfectly between airlines, and rare situations become common when you are dealing with enough people. If the gate agent can't override the system, the airline cannot operate.
I've lived in a number of countries in the past 10+ years and encountered more than my fair share of edge cases when flying. On the average, the gate agent has to override something 1-2 times per year when I fly internationally.
It also creates a bad safety culture to over-punish mistakes, because then people don't report them for fear of being fired and the system can't be improved to minimize future mistakes.
Surprised mobile boarding passes haven't changed to ticketmaster-style passes that leverage the phone's NFC capabilities. Seems like that would be faster to scan at the gate and prevent duplication.
But it also places undue financial burden on passengers. Not everyone has an NFC-capable phone, and the workaround (paper tickets) is what we already do.
As an aside, Ticketmaster is miserable to deal with.
Not every phone has NFC capability. Every smartphone has a screen though, making scanning a barcode more accessible, and able to fallback to printing if the phone runs out of battery.
The last time I attempted to use a mobile boarding pass, the app failed to load the pass¹. I later figured out why: the airport's WiFi was MitM'ing the connection, and instead of letting an AJAX request for the boarding pass through, it wanted to serve ads. A paper boarding pass won't try to transmute itself into an ad at the moment of "Papers please."
Nobody wants to be doing that in TSA, of all places.
And if you're checking baggage at all, then you more or less get the paper pass for free.
¹…you can screenshot the pass to work around this. But now we're getting a bit closer to what the guy in the OP did!
Kind of wild at the end of the GMA video in the twitter post, they tell passengers to be careful of how you display your boarding pass. It’s not on the passengers to maintain the security of the system.
As with most things security: expecting security to be the problem of the other part(y|ies) is a recipe to security problems. Airlines need to make secure systems and processes, passengers need to try to protect their information. No amount of "well I'm the paying customer" means you completely stop playing any role in your own security.
I.e. saying you should be careful with how you display your boarding pass isn't the same thing as saying the airline's process has no blame.
General takeaway: Letting your bar/QR codes hang out may mean you're exposing your identity, or your cash even. Same goes for RFID chips of course. Good general thing to keep in mind.
A guy I know had to download an app to scan his passports RFID tag recently to verify, of all things, his LinkedIn profile.
I’m no expert, and don’t know what sort of information that exposes, but I definitely grimaced at the thought when he was telling me the steps he took to verify.
‘Better than a picture of the document’ for security, for their purposes or for my ease? Who knows. I’d be loathe to do it personally, but then again there’s probably copies of my passport floating around who knows where online.
According to the Home Office [0]
> Scanning the chip in a passport has the highest level of trust. It also collects the largest amount of data, the chip contains:
- the data in the machine-readable zone (MRZ)
- at least one or more facial biometric encoding
- zero or more finger biometric encodings
Yes, and flight specific typically, maybe it depends on airline, but at least generally it's not like a permanent ticket that gets you through to the gates for any flight, you still 'book', you just can't necessarily get a seat or boarding pass until the last minute at the gate (at check-in if it's quieter).
> Come to find out he was hiding in the bathroom until everyone boarded. The problem for him was the flight was full boarded and seated so he had no seat. My row mate boarded before the scammer did so whatever he was trying to do fell apart.
> he boarded before the the passenger who had the boarding pass information that he stole; when the other passenger tried to board, the system suggested that this passenger had already boarded, though the gate agent assumed it was a glitch, so allowed that person to board
Sounds like the sort of thing a gate agent could get in trouble for.
I don't get this. So apparently with this buddy pass thing you can pass the security, but how do you obtain a boarding pass so you can legally enter a plane? The possibility to pass security without a valid boarding pass seems like a weird loophole in the process to me
Its the same thing as “flying standby.” The gate agent will issue boarding passes during or shortly after everyone else hasboarded based on remaining non revenue (“dead head”) seats being available.
Don't know about the US, but some airports with a significant retail presence post-security allow non-passengers through to shop/eat etc. As a kid I remember my parents coming through security to send me off on a flight by myself in Australia.
I'm always protective of the visibility of my boarding pass and id at the airport. There is enough info on there (name + confirmation number) for someone to change or cancel your flight.
I've learned to just skip paragraphs online with extreme prejudice, and it makes it hard for me to read text that's online and feels like an article, but is actually very educational (like recently the HTML version of The Rust Programming Language).
> He went to the gate for the Delta flight to Austin, and used his phone to take pictures of the boarding passes of other passengers without their knowledge.
Didn't they learn from creditcards? Always have a security code on the back.
He had a 'when seat are available' ticket and when they said there were none he thought they might be lying only to find out the seats where all taken.
Does the scanning software not check that a boarding pass is valid for that flight, and that it has not already been used? Seems like this should get flagged pretty quickly when the legitimate passenger scans their boarding pass.
Modern software is so cumbersome and bug prone that people just presume bugs instead of the software doing its job.
> He made sure that he boarded before the the passenger who had the boarding pass information that he stole; when the other passenger tried to board, the system suggested that this passenger had already boarded, though the gate agent assumed it was a glitch, so allowed that person to board
The article mentions that it did detect the duplicate. What surprised me is that the airline does not check the ID at same time as the boarding pass. I mostly fly internationally, but I can’t remember ever boarding without showing both my boarding pass and my passport, and the agent verifying the match. I guess domestically this is more of a challenge because there is no standard ID document to request passengers show at the gate? Still, surely they could ask for the same document shown at security… but maybe that would cause problems with customers who have esoteric form of ID that the TSA recognizes as legitimate but a gate agent might find suspicious.
My understanding -- and grain of salt, etc, since I don't actually work for an airline or anything -- is that airlines check passports out of liability. If you were to arrive at your destination and be turned away at the border, they would be required to fly you back to your country of origin. So....they check passports.
TSA checks IDs -- any valid IDs -- to let you in the secure area.
Unrelated to the main topic of the post, but is this actually true?
> If you were to arrive at your destination and be turned away at the border, they would be required to fly you back to your country of origin
If a border agent denies you entry, even for a reason the airline could not have foreseen, they are required to fly you back? Does that also mean that an airline is only able to offer flights between countries (A,B) if it also offers them between (B,A)? And is there some maximum time allowed between those flights, e.g. an airline can only fly into a country if it also offers a flight back to the same country within twelve hours?
I seem to remember reading something about countries putting denied entries on a flight back, by effectively loaning money to for the ticket… not sure how they collect on it though.
Right, because software famously has zero bugs, and whenever people bypass the buggy system to help you out, they should be punished. Sounds like a great society.
the common sense thing to do would be to allow the customer with a valid boarding pass to board, and also proactively alert security to check the plane, just in case it’s not a software glitch.
Hmm - flouting regulations cause the rules only apply for others, selfish with seeming no regard for any negative impact to others…sounds like a future executive indeed
You're doing the same thing, "resulting" because this time he almost got away with it. In reality, a scheme like this would work maybe one in twenty times. "Think in bets" on a 5% chance of success.
Na, I'm saying they literally can't do the thing you want them to.
But let's use a reference on ethics a little more sophisticated than a poker player: Immanel Kant. Would this strategy still be a good idea if everyone did it?
Clearly not. Setting aside how few people can hide in one water closet, if nobody pays for tickets there won't be an airplane to hide on. Frankly, anyone encouraging this behavior is suspect and reflects poorly on the HN community, which is likely why your post is being greyed out.
Re: your last sentence, this tells me that "the HN community" skews toward programmers who are happy to collect big paychecks while turning a blind eye to where the money comes from, e.g. what their founders and CEOs did to successfully startup.
Airbnb, Facebook, Microsoft, Uber - off the top of my head - all very prosperous and genteel now, but all came from hardscrabble rule-breaking backgrounds.
"He made sure that he boarded before the the passenger who had the boarding pass information that he stole; when the other passenger tried to board, the system suggested that this passenger had already boarded, though the gate agent assumed it was a glitch, so allowed that person to board"
No he doesn't. Why does Gen-Z always think they can take advantage of companies which amounts to fraud and stealing? I somewhat think it's related to social media and instagram culture.
You're right about the extra fuel, though I really don't know what an extra 100-200lbs would cost to transport.
The movie theater example seems similar to the airplane: as long as there's an empty seat then it seems like stealing isn't quite the right word. Freeloading might be more apt.
It wasn't really a hack. It's standard policy for gate-checkers to confirm that the name on the boarding pass matches the name and photo on a piece of ID carried by the person. That's the rule for domestic flights. He took advantage of the gate crew slacking off on the job. Props to him for trying, but nothing is broken in the system. A piece of govt. ID is mandatory to fly domestically.
Those pages both refer to the security checkpoint, not the gate agent prior to boarding. I've never had my ID checked while boarding domestically in the US.
I used to get my ID checked at the gate occasionally. But that was in the before times, when there was no id or boarding pass required to get through security.
I'm sure there's some nefarious thing you can do where two people collude to swap boarding passes after security, but I don't believe it's worth the effort for airlines to try to prevent that. Maybe something with discounts or mileage accumulation; but it'll be a big pain if there's anything out of the schedule.
I was wondering exactly this, how is it possible to use a boarding pass twice. The answer is, "the agent assumed it was a glitch".
It's interesting that we use machines, and when they flag the type of error they were designed to identify, we simply assume they don't work. Many plane accidents happen for a similar reason, the pilots thinking the systems on board are wrong and they're right.
Why don't we trust the machines? Is it because they have bugs and are sometimes actually wrong? Or because we trust our feelings more?
If the checking had been on paper, with the agent simply ticking off a list of passengers at the gate, would they have made the same mistake and assumed they got it wrong? What if the list had been ticked off before by somebody else?