On Christmas Eve another stowaway was caught on a Delta Air Lines flight. This time Delta 487 from Seattle to Honolulu had someone onboard without a ticket.
They’d managed to get through TSA security with no boarding pass, and to get past the gate agent and onto the Airbus A321neo.
As the plane taxied for departure the extra passenger was discovered.
The flight returned to the gate, and everyone was offloaded from the aircraft for re-screening, delaying the flight more than two hours.
Police used video surveillance to locate the stowaway in a terminal restroom where they were apprehended.
The TSA excuse their lapse by saying they underwent standard security screening and was found not to possess any prohibited items.
If that were sufficient, however, having a boarding pass match an ID shouldn’t be a requirement!
Without it, though, they can’t check passengers against targeting databases. And they wouldn’t have needed to re-screen everyone on board.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, another passenger stowed away on a Delta flight – that time to Paris.
They hid themselves most of the trip by moving between lavatories.
She was later arrested for attempting to cross into Canada after cutting off an ankle monitor.
Back in March, a stowaway was caught flying Delta Air Lines from Salt Lake City to Austin.
They found him after he snapped a photo of a child’s boarding pass and used it to get on the plane and then hid in the lavatory.
It turns out it was a full flight so there was no empty seat to sit in, and the plane turned around and went back to the gate.
The child’s boarding pass had errored as already having been used, but the gate agent overrode it and let the kid board anyway.
Then, in April, there was a Delta flight with two different sets of stowaways. Here, a serial stowaway explains how she does it.
