There are certain things you really should double-check when booking a flight. The dates, for example.
Of course, this is something travelers have dealt with for years in places like New York, London and Paris, where multiple airports serve the same metropolitan area. But Sydney, Australia, has only recently joined that particular club, and apparently not everyone got the memo. The city’s brand-new Western Sydney International Airport (WSI) began handling passenger flights on Sunday, October 25, 2026, after decades of planning and construction. And it took approximately no time at all for passengers to start showing up somewhere other than where they thought they were going.
Swedish traveler Julie Lundmark and a friend had spent the weekend visiting Melbourne. They’d flown out of Sydney’s longtime airport, Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD), and presumably expected to return to the same place. After all, that’s where they’d left their car. But when their Jetstar flight JQ373 landed, they looked out the window and realized that absolutely nothing looked familiar.