Serial Stowaway Strikes Again—Caught In Delta Lavatories, Now Sneaks Onto United Flight To Milan

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!