A 9-year-old boy snuck onto a Delta flight by himself two weeks ago. The boy not only made it through airport security, but he also found a way to get through the boarding line and onto the plane. And, apparently, he did it all without a boarding pass.
The flight crew finally became suspicious of the child’s circumstances during the flight from Minneapolis to Las Vegas, according to Patrick Hogan, a spokesman for Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. In a statement, Hogan said crew members turned the boy over to Child Protective Services in Las Vegas.
But the boy, whose identity has not been released, has had other run-ins with the law. About a month ago, police arrested him for stealing a car. He once snuck into a Bloomington water park by slipping in behind large families. And the day before he found his way onto Delta Flight 1651, he surveyed the airport environment by pulling another trick. The boy stole luggage from baggage claim before eating at an airport restaurant. According to New York Daily News, he then asked the server to watch his luggage while he went to the restroom. He never returned to pay the bill.
The boy is as youthful and scheming as Kevin McCallister from Home Alone and as conniving as Frank Abagnale Jr. from Catch Me If You Can.
“I don’t have an angel, OK. I have a 9-year-old,” the boy’s father said. That’s one of the scariest parts about this whole scenario—the boy is only nine.
But even scarier is the fact that he could sneak onto a flight at all. Airports, with their extensive security checks, seem like they should be some of the safest and most secure locations of all.
Officials usually ask to see boarding passes both before the security check and before boarding the plane. The Transportation Security Administration said in a statement that the boy snuck through security with other passengers.
It’s possible that the boy only got through security because of his age. TSA agents may have made the usually reasonable assumption that he, as a child, was part of a larger group. But regardless of his age, someone at the airport should have caught onto him before the flight took off.
After he made it through security, he still had to find his way past another boarding pass check at the gate. According to Hogan, a surveillance video shows that the boy snuck in when the gate agent became distracted.
And even after that, the flight crew is supposed to take a head count to ensure that the number of passengers on board match up with the number of boarding passes scanned. That’s three opportunities that airport, airline and TSA staff missed.
“All of this (security) since 9/11 has been to keep us safe. And it has, but we still have gaping holes, and this is a perfect example of it,” Terry Trippler of ThePlaneRules.com told KARE, a CNN affiliate.
The TSA recently relaxed some of its rules. It now allows kids under the age of 12 to keep their shoes on while walking through the security check.
And in March, the TSA revealed its plan to start allowing knives, toy bats, billiard cues, ski poles, hockey sticks and other currently prohibited items onto airplanes. This was met with protests, and the TSA has since dropped the effort. Still, both of these actions suggest that airports are so safe that they require less regulation than they currently enforce.
This contradicts the incident with the 9-year-old boy, which demonstrates the imperfection of the TSA’s security measures. Sure, we should be grateful that the boy was a boy and not a terrorist. This particular event’s lack of violence doesn’t mean we can count on other events to not be violent—but I would hope that we could count on the TSA.
