The woman who stowed away on a Delta flight to Paris a year and a half ago, spending hours moving between lavatories to go undetected, has done it again on a United flight.
She traveled on United’s Newark – Milan flight Wednesday night. Flight attendants caught on inflight, and she was taken into custody on arrival Thursday morning. The airline says it is “investigating this incident and working with the appropriate authorities.”
She managed to get through security without a boarding pass (so TSA botched things first) and then boarded the aircraft without showing credentials to do so either.
What’s unusual here is that she keeps doing this. She actually went through security without a boarding pass at the Hartford, Connecticut airport and was found hiding in a bathroom at the Maimi airport in 2024.
New image of Svetlana Dali, the 57-year-old Russian national who snuck onboard a Delta flight from JFK to Paris last week.
She is now flying back to New York, the third attempt to get her back to the U.S. CNN's Saskya Vandoorne is on the flight and captured this photo. pic.twitter.com/266qtQzrmZ
— Pete Muntean (@petemuntean) December 4, 2024
In some sense it’s surprising when this happens, because you have to show ID to go through security, and again to board an international flight. You need a boarding pass. But one 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, on another Delta flight, there were two different sets of stowaways. And this all came months after a Russian without ticket, passport or visa flew to Los Angeles without anyone noticing. Here, a serial stowaway explains how she does it.
I’m actually surprised it doesn’t happen more often since on peak travel days you can push 3 million people through airports in the U.S. alone. With about a billion flyers a year in the United States, nearly every possible mistake will happen. A ‘one in a million failure rate’ would mean something happens a thousand times!
The last sentence hits the nail on the head in this modern day era.
Whenever we see something shocking, doesn’t matter what it is, we always go OH MY GOD. What we don’t realize is that these things will statistically happen at scale. Add in the ability to beam 24x7x365 HD video across the planet in seconds, and well, it looks like the world is enging.
I am not even talking about stowaways, I’m talking about every subject, every person, every “thing” that happens.
Example: MTA in NYC. So many people. A woman is going to give birth on a train — once a week. It just happens. Someone will get stabbled – once a weeek. It just happens. A train is going to get stuck in the tunnel with smoke. It just happens.
The only difference now is that WE CAN ALL SEE IT TOGETHER AT THE SAME TIME.
And we’re so outraged. LOL
What? Helen Hayes is still up to her old tricks from “Airport”?
If she has the United credit card she is cool tho.
So many scan(dal,s). (Ironic as you’ll never see her on an upgrade or standby list)
@Joseph – rofl, well played.
It would be really great if this kind of thing was turned out to be one of the side quests in GTA6.
They should give her a reward for helping to expose flaws in airport and airline security.
They should give her a nice reward for helping to expose obvious flaws in airport and airline security.
When they treat this with kid gloves this is what happens. Repeated. Better be sure others are learning.
She again will be provided a PD who will negotiate some kind of probation and she will just do it again. Continued to repeat and rinse. Now if they just stranded her at whatever destination and told her she’s financially responsible to get herself back to the US that would stop the behavior.
This is why Delta rolled out the new boarding procedure in which only one person may approach the gate agent at any given time and everyone else has to wait behind a sign. It prevents someone sneaking through as part of a group or family.
the statistics are far better not just for this crime but for most when you consider that the same people re-offend and commit most of them.
Time to send her to whatever that prison in El Salvador is called. or Eswatini.
At this point, it really is just performance-art.
David P. Is right. She should become a consultant to the airlines TSA and expose flaws in security.
Look at how Frank Abagnale turned his life of crime into a lucrative career (see Catch Me If You Can if you don’t get the reference).
You should note that the simple-past tense of “to err” is “err”, not “*errored”.
Make that “erred”! I pressed the send button too soon…
The Port Authority could just ban her from all its facilities – then it would be easier to detect and stop her. She’s overstayed her welcome at the Port Authority.