A passenger accidentally boarded Delta flight 607 from New York JFK to Las Vegas on Sunday. He meant to fly to Los Angeles.

A flight attendant initially told him, “You can stay on this flight and we’ll book you a connection from Las Vegas” – but that’s clearly not right. The passenger wasn’t on the flight’s manifest. That’s not allowed!

Another crewmember stepped in. The plane turned around and returned to the gate and he was removed from the flight. The 7:30 a.m. departure was ultimately delayed until 9:30 a.m. They made up half an hour of that time and arrived in Las Vegas 1 hour 21 minutes late.

Delta at New York JFK

According to Delta,

We apologize to our customers on flight 607 for the delay when their August 10 flight from JFK had to return to the gate to reaccommodate a customer who was ticketed for another flight.

So what happened? Airlines don’t staff gates the way they used to! There are a lot of passengers, not a lot of employees, and people get on without properly scanning their boarding pass or a gate agent not noticing the mis-scan. This happens more than you’d expect.

On Christmas Eve 2024 a Delta passenger got through TSA with no boarding pass, past the gate agent, and onto a flight to Hawaii. The extra passenger was disoveed while taxiing out, and everyone had to be taken off the aircraft for re-screening.

Last year at Thanksgiving holiday, a passenger stowed away on a Delta flight to Paris. They hid themselves most of the trip by moving between lavatories. She was later arrested for attempting to cross into Canada after cutting off an ankle monitor.

And in March last year, a stowaway was caught flying Delta Air Lines from Salt Lake City to Austin. They found him after he snapped a photo of a child’s boarding pass and used it to get on the plane and then hid in the lavatory. It turns out it was a full flight so there was no empty seat to sit in, and the plane turned around and went back to the gate. The child’s boarding pass had errored as already having been used, but the gate agent overrode it and let the kid board anyway.

Then, last April, there was a Delta flight with two different sets of stowaways. Here, a serial stowaway explains how she does it.