Passenger Boards Wrong Delta Air Flight And Flight Attendant Tells Him ‘Stay On Board, We’ll Book You A Connection’

A passenger boarded the wrong Delta Air Lines plane at New York JFK on Sunday, and a flight attendant reportedly initially offered to let the man stay on board with the promise that he would be rebooked on a connecting flight to get him to his intended final destination.

The flight that the man had boarded was about to depart for Las Vegas, but he actually wanted to fly to Los Angeles, resulting in a return to the gate to have him booted from the plane after another flight attendant intervened.

“About to take off from JFK to LAS, and a flight attendant approaches the guy behind me. Turns out he is on the wrong flight,” a witness wrote on social media platform Reddit.

“[The] Flight attendant says that he can either stay on the flight and then book another flight from LAS to his destination or disembark. He says he will stay.”

The witness continued: “Another flight attendant comes along and tells this guy that he is getting off the plane because there is no record of him on this flight. So now we are back at the gate. Not sure how he slipped into this plane. That concerns me.”

The man had accidentally boarded Delta flight DL-607, which was due to depart New York JFK at 7:15 am on August 10. Data supplied by Flight Radar 24 shows the Boeing 757 pushing back from the gate as planned and taxiing out to the departure runway for takeoff before suddenly making a U-turn and heading straight back to the gate.

Passenger on wrong flight
byu/PretendJuggernaut175 indelta

In the end, the flight didn’t leave New York JFK until 9:30 am and arrived in Las Vegas nearly an hour and a half late.

“Former TSA here,” one commentator wrote in response to the original post on Reddit. “Gate agents miss a lot of things. They’re managing sometimes over 100 people who are all in a hurry and in a building that makes them chronically stupid.”

“Failures happen in these situations. Everyone is overworked, underpaid, short-staffed, and under the gun from employers and entitled PAX,” the comment continued.

“Hell, I’ve seen video of people walking behind around or sometimes even right in front of the boarding agent, and nobody acknowledging it. Act like you know what you’re doing, and you get away with a lot.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Delta Air Lines told us: “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.”

Last November, a stowaway managed to deliberately sneak onboard a Delta Air Lines flight at New York JFK for transatlantic service to Paris, France.

The stowaway somehow managed to evade gate agents and flight attendants to get on the aircraft despite the fact that the flight was fully booked without a spare seat on board.

Instead, the stowaway hid themselves in a lavatory and was only discovered until the plane was a couple of hours away from landing in Paris. Once on the ground, the perpetrator was taken into custody and eventually extradited back to the United States.

The incident occurred just eight months after another stowaway snuck aboard a Delta Air flight in Salt Lake City without being noticed. In this case, the suspect secretly took a photo of another passenger’s mobile boarding pass and used the barcode to scan themselves through the gate.

Once onboard, the man planned to hide in a restroom until boarding was complete and then take any seat that was open. The man’s plan unravelled, however, when he walked the length of the plane to discover that the flight was fully booked.

In another incident in December 2024, Delta Air flight attendants foiled a stowaway attempt by an unticketed suspect who evaded gate agents and sneaked onboard a Honolulu-bound flight from Seattle Tacoma International Airport on Christmas Eve.

According to a Port of Seattle spokesperson, the stowaway had hidden inside the secure ‘airside’ area of the terminal overnight before managing to sneak onboard the Hawaii-bound plane.

In all of these cases, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) insisted that the stowaways had been subject to routine airport security screening, ensuring that they did not have anything dangerous on them when they boarded these flights.