A Japanese airliner bound for Tokyo was forced to turn around over the Pacific Ocean and return to Los Angeles on Tuesday after the discovery of an “unauthorised person” among the 150 passengers on board.



The flight made an unscheduled U-turn four hours into the 11-and-a-half-hour journey.



There was no security or safety threat involved, however – it appears that the rogue passenger, who has not been identified, managed to proceed from check-in all the way to the final boarding pass check at LAX and board the wrong plane.

The American model, Chrissy Teigen, who was on the All-Nippon Airways flight 175, live-tweeted the episode to her 9.2 million followers: “A flying first for me: 4 hours into an 11 hour flight and we are turning around because we have a passenger who isn’t supposed to be on this plane. Why...why do we all gotta go back, I do not know.”

Speculating that the passenger responsible must be “mortified”, Teigen, who was with her husband, the singer John Legend, posted several tongue-in-cheek updates as they continued their “flight to nowhere”.

“Why did we all get punished for this one person’s mistake?” she asked. “Why not just land in Tokyo and send the other person back? How is this the better idea, you ask? We all have the same questions.”

I won’t be able to sleep until I know how this person figured out they were on the wrong flight. That’s all I ask. 150 people have been majorly inconvenienced, please, just tell me — christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) December 27, 2017

Teigen said police had interviewed people sitting near the passenger.

Airport police at LAX said the about-turn was the result of a “mix up and was straightened up”, adding that the plane was scheduled to depart on Wednesday morning local time.

A police spokesman told KTLA that the airline worked out that the incident was just a mix-up while it was still in the air, but decided to return to LAX nonetheless.

Mystery surrounds how the passenger had been allowed to board the wrong plane, with reports saying he or she had a ticket for a different airline.

“They keep saying the person had a United ticket. We are on ANA,” Teigen tweeted. “So basically the boarding pass scanner is just a beedoop machine that makes beedoop noises that register to nowhere.”

The ANA flight took off from LAX at 11:36am on Tuesday and landed at the same airport at 7:32pm – a total flying time of seven hours and 56 minutes.