Rashid

Adding the part that is easy to miss: the list is not the only thing that identifies who is aboard.

A specific flight is a public object. The airline sells it, the schedule is published, the aircraft is trackable in real time by anyone with a browser, and the departure and arrival are announced. So knowing that a particular flight exists and where it is requires no access to anything.

Which means the interesting question is usually not "who can see the manifest" but "who can connect a name to a booking" — and that is a far larger set of systems than the manifest itself: the booking platform, the travel agency, the corporate travel desk, the loyalty programme, the payment processor. The operational list is one of the better-controlled parts of the chain, not the weakest.

There is a well-known mass example: when a large amount of North American airspace was closed at short notice in 2001, a great many aircraft were sent to Canadian airports, and thousands of people ended up in small towns for days with whatever documents they happened to have.

It was handled, and it was handled by improvisation on top of exactly the discretionary framework described above. Which is roughly the answer to your question — there is a procedure for the common short case, and beyond that there is discretion plus a lot of phone calls.

The forward-looking lesson, which is the genuinely useful part for everyone reading: never plan to use the last day of a visa.

This is the standard advice among people who travel on visas regularly, and this thread is exactly why. A visa's final day is not a target, it is a hard edge, and any of a dozen ordinary travel failures — a delay, a cancellation, a strike, weather, illness — can push you across it with no decision on your part.

Building in two or three days of margin costs nothing when the trip goes normally and removes the entire category of problem when it does not. It is the cheapest insurance in travel planning.