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'H8GAYS.'

It's the last thing you'd expect to see while walking through an airport and glancing down at your boarding pass.

Indeed the one worse configuration you might see on a plane ticket would be 'LST-UR-LUGGAGE'.

But according to Jeff White, a student at the University of West Florida, the confirmation code printed on a boarding pass issued to him by Delta Air Lines read as the anti-gay slur 'H8GAYS'.

'At first I didn’t think I read it right,' White told The Washington Post.

'I was worried that another customer might think I somehow picked that code.



'If I were a gay male, I might have thought that a Delta worker purposely gave me that code, and that would have made me extremely uncomfortable.'

The error occurred on a flight to Pensacola, Florida, earlier this month.

While the pass appears to be a genuine mistake, the lettering raised eyebrows because of its likeness to that of the NO H8, an American charity set up to promote equality, specifically to endorse same-sex marriage.



Delta Air Lines apologized for any 'concern or misunderstanding' the error occurred, but insisted that the confirmation codes 'are computer-generated and are completely random'.

'We will make every effort to ensure that a similar combination does not occur in the future,' added Russell Cason, a spokesman for the airline.

However the mistake has raised questions on why the combinations 'GAY' and 'H8' weren't previously blocked from Delta's system.

White, an IT major, said that Delta has surely blocked other letter combinations and could have done so with these words/expressions.

'What surprises me is that they didn’t block [the confirmation code] as a possibility of the string of random numbers and letters in the software they use to generate the code', he said.

'I’m sure they removed many four-letter words that would be seen as offensive.

'I’m surprised that ‘gays’ and ‘H8’ weren’t blocked as well.'