I’ve had some bad flight experiences in the past, but at least I always ended up at my destination. A woman on my San Luis Obispo to Phoenix flight today wasn’t so lucky.

Most of the sparsely occupied flight was uneventful, save for the flight attendant in training making a poor go of the announcements. I relaxed by polishing off a few more chapters of Founders at Work while occasionally glancing out the window at the mountainous landscape. Everything seemed perfectly fine for everybody on board until the flight attendant announced our pending arrival at Sky Harbor.

“What?!” screamed a woman from two rows behind me. “Why are we landing in Phoenix?” Obviously, the flight was landing in Phoenix because the flight was from San Luis Obispo to… Phoenix. The increasingly flustered woman called for a flight attendant and demanded to know why the plane wasn’t landing in Las Vegas. The source of the confusion became apparent after the flight attendant looked at the woman’s boarding pass stub.

“Well, here’s the problem,” he said, “this flight goes to Phoenix, and your ticket is for a different flight that was supposed to go to Las Vegas. Not only that, but this is an America West flight, and your ticket is for United.” That’s right: the woman got on the wrong flight. I’m not sure which is worse: the fact that she flew to the wrong city or the fact that nobody noticed.

Fortunately, there are many flights from Phoenix to Las Vegas, so I’m sure her trip had a happy ending.  She also learned a valuable lesson: I doubt she’ll ever get on a future flight without triple-checking both her ticket and the plane.