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by troupo 798 days ago
Scans also track how many have boarded, and who has boarded. So that they can run a "Mr and Mrs X, haul your ass to the gate now"
1 comments

Some airports are deliberately quiet, Copenhagen for instance is or used to be. So they don't do that. If you miss your flight it's your problem.
As is OSL / Oslo Gardermoen, but on occasion they will use the PA to find late pax, at least on international flights. Presumably there's more paperwork if there's a no-show, I don't know.

Anyway, sitting in a bar there a few years ago, waiting for my flight, I hear a series of progressively more strongly worded announcements for pax X and Y to get to the gate or else.

Noone shows. Then the 'This is absolutely, positively, make no mistake about it final call for flight such-and-such, gate closes in 30 seconds.'-announcement.

At which point the two men at the table next to me get up and stroll over to the nearmost gate.

I almost fist-pumped when the gate attendant just looked at them (eyes ablaze!) and said 'Sorry, gate just closed!' then proceeded to inform whoever was listening on the VHF that pax X and Y were no-shows, presumably to have their luggage located and offloaded.

Love it when entitled people like that get their comeuppance!

Punctuality is expected here so I have a lot of sympathy with the gate attendant.

I once was one of 10 unrelated paxes that missed their flight because announcements were very quiet and boarding window was very short. Not sure whether 10% of the flight manifest were all entitled or the gate attendant was mean.
Indeed! Just a quick question to satisfy my curiosity - seeing as you fly out of Trondheim, work with embedded systems and have a background in physics, would you happen to be named Jostein and have a dark past frequenting Omega Verksted and occasionally also Akademisk Radioklubb c. 2000?
No to all those questions! Especially the dark past! :-)

But thank you, you made me laugh out loud!