Digital boarding passes and e-tickets have certainly made travel more seamless for flight passengers. However, their convenience also makes it easier for people to sneak into flights they have not booked.
Over the past weeks, Delta Air Lines has seen multiple cases of stowaway passengers on domestic flights having used screenshots and photographs of other people’s legitimate digital boarding passes and QR codes to sneak on flights.
On March 17, 2024, a Texas man was arrested when he boarded a Delta Air Lines flight at Salt Lake City Airport (SLC) bound for Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (AUS) in Texas.
He was initially booked on a Southwest flight, but because the flight ended up being full, he was reassigned to a later departure. Instead of waiting for the new designated flight, he headed to Delta Air Lines boarding gates, where he was seen on surveillance footage taking photos of unsuspecting passenger’s phones and boarding passes.
The stowaway spent most of his time inside the aircraft lavatory until a flight attendant discovered that all seats were already occupied. When the crew was able to piece all the events together, the airliner headed back to the airport gate, where the man was met by law enforcement.
More recently, on April 12, 2024, two separate stowaway cases were onboard flight DL 245 from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX).
A passenger onboard the flight shared that a family of five boarded the flight to find two people already occupying seats assigned to them. When a flight attendant intervened, one of the passengers was asked to show his boarding pass from the Delta App. He insisted that he only had a screenshot of his boarding pass because his sister booked the flight for him. Eventually, the two passengers were removed from the flight after failing to produce legitimate boarding passes rather than screenshots or photographs.
It turns out, however, that there were other stowaways on the flight. When the flight reached LAX, police officers and the FBI boarded the flight and removed three passengers from the back of the aircraft. The family of five, along with other passengers seated within the vicinity, were also taken for questioning.
Investigations showed that in most cases of passengers using the same boarding passes, gate agents simply chalk it down to a system or scanning error and, coupled with the pressures of boarding passengers in time, produce another boarding pass for the second passenger.