A Florida teen’s Christmas holiday plans were slightly delayed after he boarded the wrong plane. Instead of going to Ohio, the 16-year-old who was traveling without a guardian found himself days before the holiday in sunny Puerto Rico.
The boy, who has only been identified by his first name Logan, was mistakenly allowed on the wrong Frontier Airlines flight while at the Tampa International Airport on Dec. 22, 2023, according to a statement from the airline.
“Both the San Juan and Cleveland flights departed from the same gate with the San Juan flight departing first,” the statement read, according to Spectrum News 1.
Frontier agents promptly addressed the error as soon as they identified it, taking swift action to rectify the situation.
“He was immediately flown back to Tampa on the same aircraft and accommodated on a flight to Cleveland the following day,” an airline representative wrote, adding, “Frontier has extended its sincere apologies to the family for the error.”
The teen was traveling over the holiday season to visit his mother for the holiday and was allowed to fly to the wrong city because the boarding gate did not verify that the boarding pass and ticket matched the flight.
Logan’s father, Ryan Lose said his son who suffers from anxiety when flying was embarking on his first solo travel so they took extra precaution to minimize potential issues. They chose Frontier because the flight was direct from Tampa to Cleveland, and believed there could be no slip-ups since he had no layovers.
However, there were a few slip-ups. Logan saw people boarding a plane for Cleveland when he arrived at the gate around 8:30 p.m. Even though his flight was supposed to leave a bit later, around 10:30 p.m., he thought it might be boarding early.
When he asked a gate agent if it was boarding, the agent told him yes and then checked if Logan’s bag could fit the flight. The agent then let him board after only quickly looking at his boarding pass. Had the agent scanned the boarding pass, the mix-up might not have happened.
While on the flight and in his seat, Logan put on his headphones and started to listen to music to help him relax. He missed the flight attendant announcing that the flight was going to the Caribbean island.
Context clues signaled to Logan’s family that he was on the wrong flight.
First, before putting on his headphones, he called his mother and told her he was on the flight. Logan’s mother called his stepmother to share the news, but she immediately thought the boarding was too soon.
Then, his 9-year-old brother looked up the flight and saw the flight leaving from that terminal at that time was not going to Cleveland, but Puerto Rico.
The dad said he tried to call his son to see if he was on the wrong flight but got his voicemail.
“If you know 16-year-old boys, they’re not going to turn the phone off unless they absolutely have to,” Lose said in an interview with Business Insider. “So that’s when we immediately were like, ‘He’s on this Puerto Rico flight somehow, and we don’t know how he got on it.'”
Lose’s family tried to reach out to Tampa Airport and Frontier Airlines to confirm if Logan was on the flight, but believe Frontier didn’t take their concerns seriously.
The airline only confirmed Logan was on the plane close to 10 p.m. after he didn’t show up for the Cleveland flight. After verifying he was on the flight, Frontier arranged for Logan to stay on the plane when it landed and return home and was placed on the flight to Ohio the next day.
This is not the only flight mix-up with a minor traveling over this holiday season.
The day before the teen’s flight, a 6-year-old boy en route to visit his grandmother for the holidays, scheduled to travel from Philadelphia to Fort Myers on Thursday via Spirit Airlines, inadvertently boarded the wrong plane.
Although purportedly under the supervision of a gate agent in Philadelphia, the child ended up on a plane bound for Orlando, landing 160 miles away from his designated destination at Fort Myers airport, despite the child having a tag around his neck indicating “final destination RSW.”
Spirit Airlines released a statement saying it had terminated the agent who was responsible for the first grader and placed him on the wrong flight.
