‘Home Alone 2’ nailed holiday travel chaos, but flight rules make movie’s plot less plausible today

Panic erupts in the McCallister household as soon as the day begins. The parents’ alarm clock never rings, bags and coats spill across the floor, and the family barrels out the door to catch a flight to Florida.

The pandemonium intensifies at the airport. The McCallisters dodge fellow holiday travelers and luggage as they sprint to their gate while final boarding calls echo overhead. Amid the mayhem, 10-year-old Kevin accidentally boards the wrong plane and finds himself alone in New York City just days before Christmas.

More than 30 years after “Home Alone” turned travel chaos into comedy, the frantic opening scenes of the movie’s 1992 sequel still hit close to home, especially as the busy year-end travel period gets underway. But would Kevin McCallister still end up “Lost in New York” in 2025?

In an age of federal airport security checkpoints and digitized air travel, the fictional character played by Macaulay Culkin almost certainly wouldn’t have gotten onto a commercial airliner by himself, according to Sheldon Jacobson, who studies air travel operations and security and whose research contributed to the design of TSA PreCheck.

“In the 1990s, it was plausible,” Jacobson said. “It was close enough to plausible that people weren’t rolling their eyes at it, but this would not happen today.”

The September 11, 2001, attacks fundamentally changed how Americans move through airports, ushering in the creation of the Transportation Security Administration, government-run security screenings, mandatory ID checks and restricted gate access. Before 9/11, travelers could head straight to their plane with little more than a paper ticket. Now, every passenger and bag is screened, names are checked against flight manifests, and access beyond security checkpoints is tightly controlled.

Even the paper tickets that made Kevin’s mix-up possible are largely a thing of the past. In the film, Kevin frantically trails a man wearing a coat like his father’s to the wrong gate at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, then crashes into an airline agent, sending both his ticket and a stack of boarding passes fluttering to the floor.

“Do you have a boarding pass?” the agent asks. Kevin gestures to the pile of paper tickets and is ultimately allowed onto the plane.

Today, boarding passes are tied to specific passengers, often stored on smartphones and scanned at the gate to confirm travelers are on the correct flight. Airlines have also implemented stricter unaccompanied minor policies that would add yet another layer of protection, according to Jacobson.

In the movie, the gate agent walks Kevin down the jet bridge and asks if he spots his family onboard. Kevin points to the stranger he’s mistaken for his father. The agent waves him on, tells him to grab an empty seat and that’s that.

Most carriers now require children under a certain age, often 14 or younger, to be formally registered as unaccompanied minors if they aren’t traveling with an adult. That comes with special paperwork and airline staff members who are assigned to escort a child through the airport, to their seat on the plane, and off the plane at their destination.

The Biden administration proposed a rule last year to ban airlines from charging families additional fees to sit together on flights and requiring them to seat children ages 13 and under next to an accompanying adult when adjacent seating is available at booking. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said earlier this month he had no update on the proposal.

Even if every current safeguard somehow failed, a passenger on the wrong plane would get noticed quickly, Jacobson noted. Flight attendants review passenger counts and special-service lists before departure. A 10-year-old boy missing from one flight and an extra child on another would trigger immediate alarms.

“We take for granted that we had those freedoms back then that we don’t have today, for good reason,” Jacobson said. “We had to give up those freedoms in exchange for other freedoms, like safer air travel.”

The December holidays remain a hectic time to travel. This year, 122.4 million Americans are expected to travel at least 50 miles from home between Saturday and New Year’s Day, topping last year’s record of 119.7 million, according to AAA’s holiday forecast.

“Holiday celebrations look different for everyone, but the common thread is the desire to travel, whether it’s returning to your hometown or exploring new destinations,” said Stacey Barber, vice president of AAA Travel.

About 89% of holiday travelers, or 109.5 million people, are expected to go by car, while more than 8 million are expected to take domestic flights. These passenger numbers would be a record for the holiday period despite domestic roundtrip flights costing an average of 7% more compared to last year, according to AAA data.

In the fictional 1992 New York of “Home Alone 2,” Kevin pulls off a luxurious stay at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, where he briefly crosses paths with Donald Trump, who owned the hotel from 1988 to 1995. Trump’s connection to the hotel and his brief movie cameo have occasionally surfaced during his political career.

“It’s a wonderful story element,” said Adam Paul, a film professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, referring to the holiday chaos central to the “Home Alone” movies. “But it is ultimately a great representation of how and why we make these journeys.”