When Víctor Calderón got to the main cabin of a United Airlines flight at L.A. International Airport, he plugged in his headphones and settled into his economy seat for what he thought was a Houston-bound flight.
Like most frequent fliers, he tuned out the pre-flight briefings and instead watched movies and listened to some music. A flight attendant later offered the 54-year-old a pillow, which he found unusual on a domestic flight. After two hours in the sky, he was given his first meal.
“How strange,” Calderón thought to himself noticing the meal’s Asian flavors. “Usually they just give a snack and a soda.”
Around the six-hour mark, it was clear something was very wrong. Why hadn’t they landed in Houston, a 3½-hour flight from LAX? Panicked about his situation, Calderón let a flight attendant know that he needed to be in Houston by 5 p.m. to catch a plane to his final destination of Managua, Nicaragua.
The Salvadoran-born Angeleno discovered he was already well into a 5,400-mile flight to Tokyo.
Calderón, in an interview Wednesday about the August incident, said he was stunned. He said when he boarded there were a number of gates in close proximity, including the gate for the international flight, which was leaving roughly around the same time as his flight to Texas. And the seat he had been assigned for his Houston flight, 34D, was unoccupied on the Tokyo flight.
Calderón said that after arriving at the airport he asked staff more than once for directions to Gate 75A, which was the gate indicated on his printed boarding pass.
As he boarded, the ticket agent “just grabbed the ticket and scanned it,” Calderón said.
So, once he landed in Tokyo, was Calderón able to make the best of a bad situation and take a look around a world-class city?
No. This was in no way like the New York City-Paris switcheroo from the 1992 film “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.”
He said that flight staff warned him that he could risk detention by leaving the airport because the act itself was considered “illegal.” According to the U.S. State Department, tourists must have a valid passport as well as proof of a return or onward ticket.
Just hours after he landed on Aug. 8, 2025, Calderón was put on another flight back to Los Angeles, never stepping foot outside the international wing of the Haneda Airport.
“I was really scared, to be honest. [Especially] with everything that’s happened in the past [with immigration] and even more so when the stewardess told me that I could be arrested. I was thinking the worst,” he says. “They’re going to think I’m a terrorist, so I was nervous.”
United Airlines helped re-route Calderón to Nicaragua — and the airline did bump up his seat to first class to make up for the mix-up. He made it to his destination 48 hours after his intended arrival.
In a statement, United officials said they had reached out to the airport team to understand how this happened and had apologized to the customer for his experience, offering travel credits and reimbursement.
“We always advise customers to monitor the signs at the gate and boarding announcements to make sure the aircraft they board is going to their intended destination,” the airline added.
Calderón said his compensation was $300 in flight credits, less than half of what he paid for his original flight.
Outraged, he contacted a consumer investigative unit with the Telemundo 52 station in Los Angeles that defends Spanish-speaking viewers against fraud, scams and injustices.
“We had never heard of a case like this,” said reporter Azalea Iñiguez, “where someone was able to get on an airplane that didn’t have the authorization to be on that flight and, on top of that, that the airline wasn’t giving them enough [compensation].”
Calderón paid $655 for his original flight. He also had to buy clothes while his luggage remained elsewhere, and had to pay for a hotel in Managua because his original lodging plans fell through due to the mix-up.
“The airline was essentially making him responsible for the error,” Iñiguez said. “How is it possible that he got on that plane having a boarding pass [for Houston] and that no one detected him.”
Telemundo 52 Responde asked United Airlines to reevaluate its decision, attaching receipts for the original flight, hotel and the clothes that Calderón purchased, which reached a total of $1,095. This month, the airline “reconsidered the compensation offered” and granted him a total of $1,000 in travel credits, according to the news outlet.
Calderón said his experience left him with a valuable lesson — “first thing is making sure it’s the right gate” — but also concern about airport security.
“There’s supposed to be strict security here, and look at what happened to me,” said Calderón. “That means our security is vulnerable.”
