From the Washington Post:
Who ends up at the wrong airport? These people.
Autopilot may be fine for the plane. Not so much for passengers who *think* they know where they’re catching it.
September 12, 2025 at 5:00 a.m. EDTToday at 5:00 a.m. EDT
By Hannah Sampson and Andrea Sachs
Heading to catch a flight? Make sure you’re going to the right airport. Seriously.
Take it from Laura Wooster, a marketing and communications executive who showed up with loads of time before her Portland, Oregon-bound flight out of Washington Dulles International Airport in April. She planned to enjoy a “very large” glass of wine before takeoff.
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One hitch: Her flight was leaving from that other Washington airport, Reagan National. She found out when she entered her information at a kiosk and it alerted her that she was at the wrong place.
“I wanted to throw up,” said Wooster, 50, who pleaded with other travelers to let her catch the next taxi and got to her flight out of DCA just in time. “But it was also the pure adrenaline panic spike. I just had to get on my way as fast as I could.”
This story would be funnier if when she finally arrived in Portland, Oregon, she discovered that her meeting was actually in Portland, Maine.
The article includes this tweet from newsman Jake Tapper:
My old boss in the mid-1980s flew off one day to visit a potential client. The new client’s office was in an obscure suburb outside a major city in Tennessee, one that my boss had filed in her memory for being “famous in American popular music history.” But only after her flight from Chicago landed in Nashville did the cabdriver inform her she should have flown to Memphis.
At a meeting at the Reagan Presidential Library, northwest of Los Angeles in Ventura County, one participant had flown in to LAX and rented a car. Afterwards, she had to catch a flight home out of a regional Southern California airport, one named after a famous 20th Century movie star. I remarked to her, “Even at rush hour, traffic shouldn’t be too bad to the Bob Hope Burbank Airport, so you’ll make it in plenty of time.”
“Bob Hope?” she replied. “Lemme look at my ticket. Uh-oh, I booked my flight home from the John Wayne Orange County Airport. That’s not much further away is it?”
“Uh, it’s about 50 miles further.”
I've often found Americans to be a bit "geographically challenged". I got chatting to a very pleasant American couple a few years ago while visiting the USA. They asked where I was from originally and I told them North Wales. They asked if that was near New South Wales.
2 Panama Citys and 2 San Joses - 1 of each in the States and the others in Panama and Costa Rica. Should be some interesting stories there 🤔