There was a story recently about a flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo. The flight was supposed to take a dozen hours but after flying out for 4 hours, the plane turned around and flew for another 4 hours back to Los Angeles.

Apparently, it took them that long to notice that they had an extra passenger and wanted everyone back to figure it out.

This raised questions about the beep-boop machine that scans your boarding pass before you get on the plane.

It must have beep-booped well enough as folks boarded the plane. Speculation is that the beeping and booping doesn’t indicate whether the boarding pass that it’s scanning is for the flight that’s about to leave.

Maybe a machine that goes ping would be better.