Today, February 19, 2026, a passenger managed to board an Etihad Airways flight from Tel Aviv to Abu Dhabi, while he was registered on another flight of the same company and on the same route, which departed at a similar time.
The source of the error was the fact that a flight attendant working for the ground services company Aaerohandling that handles Etihad mistakingly issued the passenger a boarding pass for another flight during check-in.
The flight crew discovered the mistake after the passenger had already boarded the wrong plane and taken his seat, at which point it turned out that he had been marked as missing (but as being at Ben Gurion Airport) on the correct flight. Both flights were in the boarding phase and had not left the airport. The ground crew contacted him by phone and transferred him to the correct flight.
As you may recall, last December, an 18-year-old passenger infiltrated an Austrian Airlines flight from Tel Aviv to Vienna, and this was not the first case of its kind. Following the incident, procedures at Ben Gurion Airport were reviewed and tightened.
As we recently reported, the national airline of the United Arab Emirates recently announced an increase in frequencies and that the Abu Dhabi-Tel Aviv route will soon become the company's most active route in the world, with six daily flights.
Aerohandling said: "This was a human error that occurred at check-in. We contacted the passenger by phone and transferred him to the correct flight. Both flights were in a boarding process that was not completed, so there was no concern that the passenger would fly on the wrong flight."