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.
Let us hope DOGE will let us do away with the worthless TSA and privatize the function. After all… absent these lapses, the thefts, harassments etc… how many terrorists have these blue-shirted goons ever caught?
See, so many folks want to stow away so they can fly the world’s #1 PREMIUM airline!
Now if only Gary would fly them more often so he could eliminate all these pop-up ads that are plaguing this website!
Woofie, I was a GSE Designee for several years. The private security folks were just as bad as TSA. I could tell you stories…
Privatize it. You have thousands standing around that are difficult to fire. I wouldn’t trust the government to run a lemonade stand.
There has to be a Delta reason that Delta has became the premium choice for stowaways.
Seattle typically has not required boarding passes to be shown – the ID scan is supposed to be checked against the database of flyers that day, as I had been told. But perhaps they just check against ‘no fly list’.
I suspect they’ll be scanning boarding passes again.for a while.
Just curious, what do you think will change if they get rid of TSA? You’re not ever going to walk from the car right onto the plane without screening. Most of us are Precheck with Clear so we have a rather minimal screening experience as it is. I’m just curious.
I never quite got the re-screening thing. If a passenger can sneak something into a terminal past TSA, they can find a place to hide it in the terminal. It can then be retrieved by the sneaker or accomplice later. Of course, if something bad happens, the headline is: “Why didn’t they re-screen.”
Let Dror TWA884 go after the fraud. He’s still obsessed with kicking a dead horse in long-dead CMK10, but at least this Delta passenger is still alive.
I guess that word has gotten out that – unlike the way they treat engaged loyalists – Delta treats stowaways in a premium fashion.
TSA and the entire process is a joke. Have DOGE do away with TSA and go back to the private screeners with the prior equipment.