ANA flight travels for 8 hours, from LAX to LAX
Dec 28, 2017, 3:28 PM
An ANA flight bound for Tokyo left Los Angeles on Tuesday, only to return 8 hours later with all the same passengers still on board (AP Photo)
(AP Photo)
A Tokyo-bound All Nippon Airways flight out of Los Angeles turned around after four hours into its journey Tuesday because an unauthorized passenger was on board.
“Much like your father used to say to you, ‘Hey, if you guys don’t quiet down back there I’m going to turn this car around,” KIRO Radio’s John Curley said on the Tom and Curley Show.
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The passenger turned out to be the brother of another, authorized passenger, the Los Angeles Times reported. One brother had an ANA boarding pass. The other had a United Airlines ticket. Both were traveling to Tokyo. Somehow, the man with the United Airlines ticket boarded the ANA flight without any initial problems.
“This is almost inexplicable,” KIRO Radio’s Mike Lewis said. “Everyone on board, including a couple of famous people, were pretty unhappy about essentially spending 8 hours flying and ending up in the same place.”
The famous people on the flight were model Chrissy Teigen and her husband, John Legend. Teigen took it upon herself to live tweet the entire nightmarish situation.
a flying first for me: 4 hours into an 11 hour flight and we are turning around because we have a passenger who isn’t supposed to be on this plane. Why…why do we all gotta go back, I do not know
— christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) December 27, 2017
Once the plane returned to Los Angeles, the brothers were interviewed by the FBI. Law enforcement sources told ABC News that the FBI was considering bringing charges against the brothers, but no arrests had been made.
“There was no actual evidence that this was a terrorist threat, that anybody else on the flight was at risk. This was a procedural mistake,” Lewis said.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the unauthorized passenger went through TSA security as required. Airline employees just didn’t catch that he had the wrong boarding pass at the gate.
They keep saying the person had a United ticket. We are on ANA. So basically the boarding pass scanner is just a beedoop machine that makes beedoop noises that register to nowhere
— christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) December 27, 2017
Many speculated why the passenger couldn’t have been questioned once the plane arrived in Tokyo.
“Either way if something bad is going to happen, it could happen going either direction,” Lewis said. “Why not just continue ahead, have security meet you, and sort it out at the other end?”
ANA apologized to its customers in a tweet on Wednesday. And in the end, Teigen and company did make it to Japan. She even had an answer to those asking why she and John were even flying commercial in the first place:
A lot of people have been asking this and I would just like you all to know that a round trip international private flight is like…300,000 dollars https://t.co/ruHWLmPT6z
— christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) December 27, 2017
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