It gets better. Suppose Mohammed Atta’s angry kid brother, Atta Boy, had your credit card, and printed out a boarding pass as you, then gimped up a second boarding pass in his own name. At ORD security, he shows an honest Saudi passport, as Atta Boy, and a matching boarding pass. They don’t have scanners there, so unless the TSA goon has the whole no-fly list memorized, in he goes.

At the plane, even if they do scan the boarding pass (as they should) they make a big point of not asking for your ID a second time, so here he hands in the real boarding pass, as Eszter. They scan it, and he strolls down the jetway.

The security requirement was to match a valid government ID, a purchased ticket, and a name that isn’t flagged. Yet we have just spent years and gigabucks (and harassed a few billion travelers) to create a system that never checks all three things in one place.

For completeness it should be noted that in many locations AA uses a combination of a non-contact bar code scanner for self-check passes and a scanner which accepts only standard ticket stock and spits out the stub. I recently encountered this combination at O’Hare.

The airlines seem rather prone to throwing up their hands at situations like these. Last Christmas holiday, returning from LGA to PDX via ORD my wife and I got on standby for a slightly earlier flight than we reserved from LGA to ORD to allow a safer connect time in Chicago. Apparently the gate agent in New York mishandled the
standby with the result that since we “hadn’t flown” our LGA to ORD leg, they cancelled our ORD to PDX leg for which we were holding actual first class boarding passes. This was on AA where at the time I had top flyer status (EXP for those who track such). The Chicago agents shrugged their shoulders and said tough – you have no seats
since you didn’t fly here. Go away and we’ll figure out how to get you home tomorrow maybe. Of course we had boarding passes for the flight we just got off of and unused passes for the flight we were trying to board which the gate reader now viewed as invalid. It took intervention from the elite desk at American to get them to off load
a couple of non-rev passengers and even put us on the plane in a couple of very bad coach seats. The agents in Chicago had no interest in handling an obvious airline screw up to one of their best
class of passenger. Even after the fact, interactions with AA Customer relations only elicited a reluctant apology and eventually
after telephone conversations some consolation frequent flyer points. Needless to say, I do not currently go out of my way to fly American. And the airlines wonder why they have annoyed customers!

I fly a lot and I’ve boarded at gates with broken scanners several times in the past. I tell gate agents that I won’t board the plane until I watch them manually “board” me using the adjacent keyboard/screen terminal, citing FAA Rule 188, which calls for “…immediate termination of any airline employee, and possible criminal prosecution thereof, who shall allow any passenger to board a commercial aircraft without completing an accurate and complete registration of said passenger’s boarding of the aircraft PRIOR to the act of boarding.”

Oh don’t bother googling FAA Rule 188. I made it up. But it sure scares the CRAP out of gate agents. NO ONE fucks with MY frequent flier miles ;)

If you start your trip in a non-hub city, it seems not at all uncommon that the identification that let you leave won’t be considered sufficient to get you home. Shades of the Hong Kong-Macao ferry…

In ‘02, I missed a flight after checking in (I was taking oxycodone for my knee and fell asleep in the boarding area!) The bag I checked, though, merrily went along its way. This is just one incident, of course, but the airline people at either end didn’t even bat their eyelids, which probably means this happens more often than it should.

And I wouldn’t report this to the airline much less TSA, not if you want a chance on a one way ticket to Gitmo.

On the bright side, I’m sure the good folks at the Pentagon won’t mind at all if you get a round-trip (with a Sat stay) and don’t complete the return leg.

Combinatorially, of the six ways you can use one leg each from two RTs, one of them involves using the outbound legs from each RT, and hence not raise any red flags with the airline, at least if the two RTs are with different airlines.

Ezster, short of insisting that your boarding pass be scanned or otherwise recorded (on the outbound), there wasn’t much to be done. As for dealing with the airline employee, maybe the right mix of annoyance, entitlement and a how-dare-you-question-me attitude could have helped, though I could easily see them backfiring.

When we got to SFO that night to put her on the plane after her last recording session, the gate agent announced that unaccompanied minors couldn’t fly on red-eyes. My husband, much less prone to explosion, gently and repeatedly pointed out that we had been sold the ticket by an airline employee, complete with disclosure of her age, and after insisting that the base manager be called at home to rule on the matter, they finally decided instead that if the pilot allowed it, she could fly. He did and she did.

Thunderstorms canceled the commuter, but the layover in Detroit was such that I could make the drive in time for that departure. We informed the ticket agent that we were doing that, got back in the car, and drove to Detroit… To find that he’d canceled the ticket all the way through to the final destination, in spite of being informed of our intentions.

Fortunately, Dad had already been issued the boarding pass, so they had to accomidate him. But it did sour me on using commuters to save an hour’s drive.