The strangely resilient phenomenon of stowaways on planes

Ticket inspections, passport control and further checks at the gate are just three of the barriers that illegitimate plane passengers have to evade, yet some are still managing it. A man boarded a Heathrow flight to Norway without a ticket, boarding pass or passport, in one of the latest cases of sky-high stowaways.

Who has done it?

The unnamed passenger slipped on to a British Airways flight to Oslo on 13 December. Having “tailgated his way through the automatic gates at Terminal 3”, said The Telegraph, he passed through “full security screening” before reaching the gate. There, he pretended to be travelling with a family and boarded the Airbus A320. Once on board, he kept moving seats as the plane filled up. Cabin crew worked out he wasn’t a legitimate passenger and removed him.

In 2023, Craig Sturt, 46, flew on a British Airways flight from London to New York without a ticket or passport after “apparently tailgating another passenger through passport checks at Heathrow’s Terminal 5”, said The Telegraph. He was sent back to the UK, where he was charged with obtaining services by deception, being unlawfully airside and boarding an aircraft without permission.

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Last year a Russian national called Svetlana Dali boarded a Delta Airlines flight from New York to Paris without a boarding pass. When she arrived in the French capital she was taken into custody and refused entry but not charged.

Sergey Ochigava flew from Denmark to Los Angeles in 2023 with no ticket, visa or passport, said the Los Angeles Times. He was sentenced to 93 days and ordered to pay $2,174 – the cost of a one-way ticket from Copenhagen to Los Angeles.

An American woman, Marilyn Hartman, was dubbed the “Serial Stowaway” after she allegedly boarded at least 20 commercial flights without a ticket, including a 2018 British Airways flight from Chicago to Heathrow.

How do people do it?

There are “bottlenecks where passenger processing occurs”, Damian Devlin, a University of East London lecturer in aviation management, told The Telegraph. The situation “creates sufficient distraction”, with staff “so focused on a particular task and on maximising passenger throughput”, that they “fail to notice tailgating taking place”.

Speaking to CBS News in 2021, “Serial Stowaway” Hartman said it was “so crazy” to be able to get onto flights without a ticket simply by “following someone”. That person “would be carrying, like, a blue bag” and security would let me through because “they think I’m with the guy with the blue bag”.

In Dali’s case, she tried to go “under the radar” on board by “moving from one bathroom to another without taking a seat”, said The Telegraph, but the cabin crew “eventually realised what she was doing”.

Ultimately, we “don’t always know exactly how it happens”, said USA Today, because if a breach involves “lapses” at security checkpoints, the “relevant agencies” might not want to “broadcast their vulnerabilities”.

Why stowaways do it is even more mysterious. Prosecutors and defence lawyers were “unable to explain” Ochigava’s motives, said the Los Angeles Times.

Will it continue to happen?

As the airport security process becomes more and more linked to advancing technology, “it will be less likely” that this “method of sneaking onto an airplane is possible”, said Thrillist.

“Technology is continuously improving and continuously making it more and more difficult for people that have ill intent to accomplish what they’re trying to do, whether it’s X-ray machines, metal detection, liquid detection, all of the above,” said Rich Davis, from security company International SOS.