Airports no longer screen flight crews, other than a quick TSA check, so no surprise that a pilot could make that mistake.
This IS embarrassing. I also think it’s ridiculous that a certified airline pilot has to go to such an extreme. Are they really a security threat?
So stay in the terminal in Shanghai before Immigration until you can get the next flight back. That better be a really good pilot for United to spend that much money for something like that and not fire him. United sure as hell wouldn’t turn around if a pax forgot their passport.
Another possibility...the US Embassy/Consulate could have issued him an emergency passport (there really is such a thing) and they could have delivered it to the airport.
Sounds really,really stupid to me!
Yesterday I watched the Tucker Carlson podcast, he had on a woman who is a Captain with United Airlines, she flies the 767, her husband is also a pilot and flies the 787.
If you want to know about how screwed up the airline industry is, watch the podcast, pilots with 1500 hours of flight time are being hired and within 2 years they get made a Captain.
She refused to take the Covid Vaccine and got canned by United until a group of 2000 United Employees won a lawsuit, and she was brought back.
If you want to hear about what is happening inside the airline industry, the podcast was worth watching.
“Meal vouchers”
So they get a free Jimmy Johns airport sub.
Sounds like a cover story.
I was talking on the phone last December with a friend who is an airline pilot. He was somewhere in northwest Canada and forgot his jacket.
I busted him for being a professional traveler and forgetting such a basic item.
(I also travel 50-60% of the time and have never made such a stupid mistake. Wanna bet?)
stuff happens
Geez! He’ll be working without pay for years to cover the operating cost of that flight to nowhere.
Baloney. Something else was going on here.
I was on a flight to Beijing about ten years ago. Over Siberia, about 3 hours from Beijing (on a 13 hour flight), we had to turn around because a Chinese lady tried to kill herself in the bathroom. The tried to cut herself and then tried to hang herself. Blood all over. She really, REALLY didn’t want to go home.
We landed in Alaska and I’d had enough. I took the next flight home instead of waiting another day to continue.
Well back to being a bush pilot for hunters.
I’m confused, are they saying that if the pilot landed in Shanghai without his passport the Chicoms would through him in jail?