A couple of years ago a guy called Christopher Williams booked a flight internally in the UK in the name by which he was universally known - Kit Williams. They would not let him board his flight because his passport said Christopher.
Petty bureaucrat is petty.
It’s a risk of modern life. In theory, you can reduce the risk by ruthlessly harmonizing every aspect of your identity, but then you still run afoul of poorly designed systems and bad processes. Like software that doesn’t understand a name can be more than FIRSTNAME LASTNAME, or can be made of letters that don’t even exist (in English).
Bureaucrats and bureaucratic systems are designed by the lowest bidder to minimum specifications. Then they’re poorly used and poorly maintained. And since the bureaucrat never suffers for the problem, the problem doesn’t need to be fixed.
And yet, we still manage to suffer along, mostly getting by. Except for the unluckies whose various innocent non-infractions (wrong accent, or basic facts of identity don’t conform to stupid system assumptions, etc.) run afoul of the bureaucratic fetish for being technically correct.
No, OP, you really don’t need to be concerned with a trivial system stupidity about your name. You probably don’t profile as a threat, and the chances of getting a rigid pinheaded dictator-in-training at the counter and gate aren’t really that high. And frankly, if you get one of those, you’ll have problems even if your papers are in perfect order.
Back when they ruled that the ticket must be in the name that’s on the ID, which in turn chain-reacted with how the name on the replacement passport had to coincide with the name on the birth certificate and secondary ID, I was able to notice the problems that arose with the systems. American Airlines, doing at the time a lot of Latin American business, had no problem with multiword surnames. But most others forced me to become Mr. Deliriousmatronymic or Mr. Delirious[hyphen]Matronymic. To this day most of my flights are in the name of Mr. Deliriousmatronymic.
(* History: Had my passport issued while a Maryland resident c. 1990 as plain J_ R_ Delirious and really liked it; lost it in the mid 2000’s when back residing in PR and of course the Birth Certificate and Driver’s License and Voter Registration here read J__ R__ Delirious Matronymic, and no you can’t ditch the last bit any more, said La Burócrata at the passport processing window. So off to my FF programs to change my profiles…)
Virgin Atlantic does this to me every time I go to the UK, shoving my first and middle names together. I’ve never had a problem getting there or coming home.
My last name is hyphenated. I wish I had a dollar for ever time I’ve encountered a computer system which stubbornly refuses to accept the hyphen as a valid character in the name field. The worst example was an insurance company whose main computer WOULD accept the hyphen but whose web portal would NOT accept the hyphen, so it refused to let me access my account online because the names didn’t match.
When I fly, I make sure to take both my driver’s license and my passport, one which has the hyphen and one which doesn’t, so I’m covered either way.
With his name in all caps and no space between his first and middle “name”, does the TSA have any authority considering the OP’s person does not have a contract in bond with them?
Probably not, so long as the OP doesn’t mind having his legal strawman fly in his stead.
Oh, dear. I hadn’t even contemplated this issue when I’d planned to take my intended’s hyphenated surname (which, as I told him, I was only taking because it sounded posher than mine, not because of patriarchal societal expectations).
It sounds like it can be a PITA.
Spelling errors, as people here have mentioned, can be a big deal.
The lack of separation between middle and first names is not an issue. Same goes for appending things like MR to a name. Different counties, different systems, etc.
Sometimes when mistakes are made it’s cheaper to change your name than change your ticket