Man boards the wrong flight... goes 1400 miles in the wrong direction

I accidentally ran across this puff piece in some strange and obscure news aggregate that normally steers away from politics and war and instead just focuses on rather bizarre stories from all around the world. This isn't exactly news although it could be said that the person involved is a bit dumb. It also doesn't say much about the airlines involved and also begs the question of what exactly, does all the hassles and security that are at airports accomplish? There are times where it is so difficult to get on a flight that a person actually DID book that it has at times encouraged me to either not travel, or to figure out some other way of getting there.

Flying is a pain in the ass now although thanks the everyone admitting defeat or having Covid under control or whatever, a great many of the hassles are gone now but there are still a lot of them.

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The guy's name was Christopher Paetkau and he is a wildlife photographer. His flight in Canada was meant to be just a short 3 hour flight to somewhere local in Canada but because the airlines computers were down, the staff were just checking people in by hand. He managed to just follow the crowd because he was running late to the gate and didn't even look at the screens next to the jetway and ended up getting on a plane that wasn't going where he booked.

Because the seat number he had booked was open at the time, the attendants just let him sit down. It wasn't until many hours later that he found out he was actually on a flight to Antarctica. This was obviously not where he wanted to go, although it does sound like it would be an interesting place to travel to. It ended up taking the man more than 2 days to get to where he had originally booked.

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Antarctica actually does have an airport but as you may know, there aren't exactly a ton of places to stay there and to my knowledge there aren't any hotels and very little infrastructure. The only people that go there are researchers and of course there are very good reasons for this seeing as how it is some of the most inhospitable environments on Earth.

I find this to be a fun story and everyone involved kind of had a sense of humor about it, including Christopher. I mean at the end of the day ultimately you are at least somewhat responsible to make sure that you are queuing up for the correct plane, aren't you? We have all seen the rather drone-like way in which the flight attendants take your tickets and for the most part, I don't think they even look what is on your ticket. The computer scanners maybe would have caught this but who knows? Maybe they don't. We'll go ahead and assume that they would but like I mentioned before, the computer system was down at the time.

This story kind of rings true in my own life because despite all the security that exists at this very busy airport that I was at years ago, I ended up on the wrong flight as well. It wasn't until I got to my seat and saw that it was occupied that I got the attention of a flight attendant that it was discovered that I was on a plane to the correct destination, but on the wrong day. My flight was tomorrow.

This makes me wonder if all of the security checkpoints are actually even doing anything. I had shown my passport and boarding pass multiple times before getting on the plane and nobody noticed that it was the wrong day? How about when I actually received my boarding pass in the first place? You'd think that the person handing it to me would have mentioned that I was there a day early. There can't be many people who go to the airport a full 24-hours before their flight in order to get a jump on the lines.

Nobody was upset and they had a laugh about the entire situation. The airline paid for him to get to his real destination and were great at the customer service. So I guess there is a happy ending for this story but at the same time it kind of points out the senselessness of all of the inconveniences that we are subjected to in airports. If they don't actually catch rather important details like making sure the passengers are on the correct plane, how can we really believe that they are catching criminals and what not?

I had a funny idea that I was just going to find a major carrier and buy a really cheap ticket to somewhere and then enter the terminal and find somewhere exotic and expensive to travel to and just try to get on those planes. Since no one actually looks at your tickets I suppose it could work in the end unless the flight was sold out!