An airline has apologized to a man who was given an offensive boarding pass code.

Jeff White was handed a pass that proclaimed “H8GAYS” when he boarded a recent Delta Air Lines flight from Florida to New York, the Washington Post reported.

White, a student at the University of West Florida, said he was left “extremely uncomfortable” upon reading the code.

“At first I didn’t think I read it right,” White said. “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.”

A Delta spokesman apologised for any “concern or misunderstanding” that its code may have caused.

What your flight number really means

“These confirmation codes are computer-generated and are completely random,” the spokesman said. “We will make every effort to ensure that a similar combination does not occur in the future.”

However, White wants assurance that this won’t happen to any other passengers.

“I’m an IT major, and what surprises me is that they didn’t block [his 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.”