Couple flown to wrong continent after airline error

[FarCenter]

Sandy Valdiviseo and her husband Triet Vo were intending to fly from Los Angeles to Dakar in Senegal with Turkish Airlines. However, instead they ended up almost 7,000 miles away – on an entirely different continent – in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, after the airport codes were mixed up, the Los Angeles Times reports.

The airport code for Dakar, the capital of Senegal, is DKR, while the code for the airport in Dhaka, which is the capital of Bangladesh, is DAC.

After arriving in Istanbul, the couple had boarded a connecting flight. It was only after seeing the route map of the flight’s progress, which showed the plane over the Middle East, that they realised the error.

“When the flight attendant said we were heading to Dhaka, we believed that this was how you pronounced 'Dakar' with a Turkish accent," Ms Valdivieso said.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/10067136/Couple-flown-to-wrong-continent-after-airline-error.html

[Buzz Clik]

1. I once overhead a similar conversation at a service counter.

Some poor soul was sitting in the Dulles Airport instead of being in Dallas.

The two destinations sound similar, but what is all the scanning of boarding passes all about if not to help avoid such things?

[Retrograde]

3. It took me a while once to convince a baggage checker in Paris that the code for Chicago was not CHI

It's not intuitive that ORD = Chicago O'Hare (it's from an old name for the airport, Orchard Field) and not CHI.

San Jose, California and San Jose, Costa Rica also get mixed up too often.

[cloudbase]

2. I'll bet they're thinkin'

Fukuoka, Japan. (FUK)

[BainsBane]

4. My luggage has gone strange places

Once it game back with sand in it. I have no idea what happened, but I've never been sent to the wrong continent.

[Buzz Clik]

6. Sand? My lost baggage has come back with less than it had originally, but never more.

How odd.

[nilram]

7. My luggage was once having an affair in Charleston, SC. It went there often.

It's getting more frequent flyer miles than I am.

[undeterred]

5. My bags once took a trip to Minneapolis

instead of Madison (MSP instead of MSN)...

I like to think I would notice if I were expecting to land somewhere and the plane took me to another continent entirely.

[Buzz Clik]

8. Lost luggage. What a joy.

I was taking a tiny commuter from St. Louis to Manhattan KS. I handed them the bag outside my plane just as I was going up the stairs to board. My bag went to Fort Scott, Arkanasas.

I had a colleague who was doing a whirlwind tour of big cities in the Far East -- one day each in six cities. Her bag got separated from her on day one, and spent the next week being one stop behind. She never saw it again until she got back to the US.

[Initech]

9. I was this close to booking a flight to MCO (Orlando) instead of MCI (Kansas City).

Thankfully I recognized the error before I did otherwise...

[frazzled]

10. That had to be a whole series of errors (including on the part of the passengers)

1. At the issuance of the tickets. (This could be the airline's fault; or it could be the passengers', if they bought them online and put in the wrong code themselves.)

2. At the check-in, where passports and tickets are checked.

3. At the gate, where the tickets are scanned.

4. On the plane, where they always announce, "This is Flight XXX to Dhaka." Only this last mistake is perhaps understandable, because the passengers might not hear the difference between Dakar and Dhaka. Hopefully the announcer would say Dakar, Senegal or Dhaka, Bangladesh.

But hell, they should have checked where their tickets were marked for, and the airlines should have double checked.

[marmar]

11. But if the reservation was correct.....

...... shouldn't the computer have flagged it when they attempted to board the Dhaka flight?

[Baitball Blogger]

12. What a great story!

[Scuba]

13. Coming soon from the airlines: destination accuracy-checking fee of $50.00.