A stowaway has managed to fly from New York to Paris for free by switching from one toilet to another during the flight.
The unidentified woman reportedly boarded Delta airlines flight 264 after passing two security checkpoints at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport Tuesday night – despite not having a boarding pass.
She was only caught shortly before arriving at Charles de Gaulle airport around 12pm on Wednesday after more than seven hours in the air.
She reportedly spent the whole flight walking back and forth between the four toilets on board, which made some passengers suspicious who said they initially thought she was just ill.
Cabin crew realised she wasn’t one of the 375 passengers when she failed to show them a boarding pass.
The woman was removed from the aircraft by local police as soon as the plane landed, NBC reports.
The US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said that the woman had completed a full security screening at a checkpoint before boarding the flight as she was not carrying any prohibited items.
Authorities confirmed to CNN that she bypassed two identity verifications and boarding status stations to board the plane, but it is unclear how she managed to get past these checkpoints.
The unidentified woman reportedly boarded Delta airlines flight 264 after passing two security checkpoints at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on Tuesday night – despite not having a boarding pass (file image of a Delta flight)
People on board were only told about the stowaway once the plane had landed in Paris, according to Rob Jackson, who was a passenger on the Delta flight.
‘The first announcement to passengers that there was a problem was when we parked at the gate and they instructed us all to remain seated because French police were going to board the aircraft to deal with “a serious security issue”,’ he told CNN.
The captain reported told passengers that they had to wait on board until the issue with the ‘extra passenger’ was ‘sorted out’.
According to Jackson, the flight was fully booked and there were no extra seats where the woman could have sat down.
Delta Airlines said in a statement that it was conducting an ‘exhaustive investigation of what may have occurred and will work collaboratively with other aviation stakeholders and law enforcement to that end’ after promising that nothing was ‘of greater importance than matters of safety and security.’
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
