Two passengers off of Delta’s flight DL5684 in Las Vegas on Saturday were questioned and the plane’s baggage swept after 2 passengers “went down the jetway and.. went down the stairs” at the end of the jetway and onto the tarmac rather than boarding the San Jose-bound Embraer.
“The two men were told their bags would be checked at the gate and put on the plane and they somehow thought they had to go out and get their bags at the end of the jetway,” DeFrank said after the situation was resolved. “It was just a misunderstanding and they had valid boarding passes so they were allowed to fly.”
My first reaction to this was, wait .. Delta offers 3 peak daily departures San Jose – Las Vegas?
That and with the sheer number of passengers, and crew that may not always try super hard to communicate clearly, I’m surprised this doesn’t happen much more often.
Maybe they don’t forget the fight name and number!
Here is the really funny part. In the vast majority of airports in the US the door from the Jetbridge to the Tarmac has a cipher lock not on the inside where you would expect it to keep this from happening. The majority of them are on the outside where of course you should only find people who are cleared to go back and forth between the two sides of the door.
So we let the pax free to roam the ramp while locking the employees out from getting into the terminal.
The lock on the outside rather than inside is most likely because of fire regulations.
To be fair to these guys, sometime’s its not clear where to pick up the bags that do get gate checked, particularly on the smaller airplanes.
Why would they ‘get their bags’ while boarding?
That reasoning makes sense if they were arriving – not so much if departing.