How come the slightest typo on a flight ticket means you won’t get on the plane/admitted into the country?

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Even correct spelled names in the in the wrong fields won’t do, like first name in surname and vice versa. Where does the problem occur? Cause you have like atleast 5 – 10 customs agents and flight staff manually watching your passport/ticket, and they should be able to conclude that the ticket is yours. Or?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

In statistics we worry specifically about the “cost” of “false positives” vs. “false negatives”.

In this case lets allow “cost” to the result.

Let’s also say our assumption is that a typo on a flight ticket is always the result of deliberate malice, a person is trying to illegally sneak on a plane as part of a criminal act.

If the person is totally innocent and it’s just a typo and we prevent them from getting on the plane, that’s a “false positive” and if the person is a criminal but we let it slide, that’s a “false negative”.

The cost of a false positive is inconvenience to a person, they have to get their ticket corrected, or prove their identity and that’s a darn hassle, but only for that person. The cost of a false negative is the person is committing a crime and going to commit a criminal act of some sort.

By definition security will seek to limit false negatives as much as possible (prevent crimes) and it doesn’t really care if false positives get swept up in their process.

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