Originally Posted by
SWBKCB
Which bit is incorrect? It's the airlines responsibility, no matter the reason for the the process failing. And why not do a head count, doesn't take long to walk from one end of the cabin to the other.
Almost no airlines do headcounts, unless there are actual known discrepancies where this may help. Did you not read? There was no known discrepancy with this flight until the passengers themselves realised it had actually departed without them. If you are not privy to airline and airport boarding procedures, other than having your boarding pass scanned by a gate agent, this would explain your bias. Whether right or wrong, almost all airlines jave the same procedure in place with their ground handlers. The only solution here is emsuring those assistance passengers never had their boarding cards scanned or confirmed until they actual boarded onto the aircraft. If they hadn't, this would have shown up on the boarding system as missing pax with bags attached to their names. A whole myriad of failures happened by the ground agents here - with the main one being communication. Vienna need to investigate that their assistance passenger procedure is robust enough. Moving passengers to another area away from.the boarding gate is always going to be risky.