The case of the woman who dodged TSA checkpoints and a US airline’s boarding protocols to hop on a flight to Paris is raising alarms about a wider aviation security problem. Multiple similar breaches of security have occurred within air travel, including some this year, but they often go undocumented.
During one of the busiest travel periods on record for the Transportation Security Administration, Svetlana Dali, 57, slipped past airport security and made her way onto a flight over Thanksgiving from New York to Paris, making it most of the way there before being detected. Her case made international headlines, but stowaways are not as uncommon as travelers may think.
This example, and many others over the years, have sounded alarms to public officials on protocols and safety. Airlines, too, have developed security plans to ensure things go according to plan. But even then, people can slip through.
Although the reported cases are few, they happen all over the world, according to Alexandra James, an analysis output manager at Osprey Flight Solutions, which analyzes security risks in the aviation sector. She has written a case study on stowaway situations.
James said she draws information from open-sourced information, such as media reports.
“I hesitate to say [this happens] a lot, but I wouldn’t hesitate to acknowledge it as a security weakness,” James said.
One potential solution — electronic gate technology that allows only one passenger to pass through at a time — would require more federal investment, aviation security officials have said.
Security failures
Dali was charged with being a stowaway on a vessel or aircraft without consent, among other federal charges. She was released from custody with more than a dozen conditions, CNN reported, but then 10 days later, she was taken into custody again, this time trying to sneak into Canada on a bus.
Prosecutor Brooke Theodora said Dali told investigators she had tried to stow away before at a number of airports. She highlighted a police report from February 2024 indicating Dali tried to enter a secure arrivals area at Miami International Airport and get through customs to the planes, going against people arriving and trying to leave the airport.
Around the busy Thanksgiving travel holiday, Dali bypassed an airport terminal employee in charge of the security lane reserved for airline flight crews at John F. Kennedy International Airport’s Terminal 4 main checkpoint, a TSA spokesperson told CNN after the incident.
Dali managed to skip the station where her ID and boarding pass would have been checked, the spokesperson said. She then joined the line for standard TSA carry-on baggage screening.
It remains unclear how Dali was able to get past Delta Air Lines gate agents at JFK. Delta has not said how she was able to board the plane once she made it past the TSA checkpoint.
Delta later told CNN it was “thoroughly addressing” what it described as a “deviation from standard procedures” that enabled Dali to board the plane without a boarding pass. The airline did not provide specifics but said in a statement it reviewed its own security and its infrastructure is “sound.”
The airline did not have anything additional to add after CNN asked for further comment following the incident for this story.
TSA is conducting its own investigation of the incident.
TSA Administrator David P. Pekoske suggested this month that installing electronic gate technology — known as e-gates — could be a solution to making sure all passengers are screened.
The technology could integrate with the agency’s facial recognition systems at checkpoints, but it would require more federal investment, the agency has said.
Two types of stowaway incidents
James categorizes stowaway incidents two different ways. There are stowaways who breach perimeter fences illegally or are smuggled inside the airport by someone else, and then there are stowaways such as Dali, who are unticketed passengers trying to get on a flight.
She points to a handful of reported cases in 2024, including Dali’s case, which happened despite a slew of security measures implemented at airports in the more than two decades since 9/11. These include not allowing unticketed passengers past security checkpoints, sophisticated ID checks by the TSA and electronic scans of boarding passes at gates.
Aviation security, she said, is like an onion. There are layers of elements that comprise it.
“If you’re the last layer in the onion [where a passenger gets on an aircraft], then it shouldn’t be considered the least important,” James explained. “It should be considered the most important.”
Many stowaways take an incredibly risky route outside the airplane cabin in their attempts to travel undetected.
In 2011, the Federal Aviation Administration reported 89 people had attempted to fly in the wheel well or other compartments exterior to the aircraft cabin, excluding the cargo area. Of those 89, only 18 survived.
There are no more recent statistics from the FAA. And the FAA confirmed to CNN that it has never formally tracked stowaway cases.
Other would-be stowaways try to bypass security measures to travel in the passenger cabin.
In February of this year, there was a woman who bypassed the TSA documentation checkpoint by jumping a barrier to an unattended section. In March, a Texas man who took photos of other passengers’ tickets boarded a Delta Air Lines flight from Salt Lake City International Airport to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
Last year, another woman boarded an Air France flight bound for London-Heathrow International Airport with no identification or boarding pass. The crew noticed her, and she was removed from the aircraft before takeoff.
There’s also the famous case of Marilyn Hartman, the serial stowaway, who was thought to have boarded at least 30 flights between 2002 and 2019, including international flights.
James said Hartman’s and Dali’s cases are interesting because their demographics, white women in their 50s and 60s, may not seem like a threat to some security officers.
“This incident demonstrates that possibly more needs to be done to raise awareness of the fact that profiling isn’t necessarily the most effective way of determining whether somebody’s a threat,” James said.
The upside, according to Juliette Kayyem, a former Department of Homeland Security official, is that Dali didn’t end up being much of a threat.
Despite this, Kayyem, also a senior national security analyst for CNN, called it a “complete failure.”
“She falls outside of every high-risk profile by age, gender and ethnicity and therefore, that might explain why the systems did not pick her up,” Kayyem said.
Lessons learned
While these instances might occur more than we realize, they are still “exceedingly rare,” according to former TSA administrator John Pistole.
“It gets a lot of attention because it shouldn’t happen,” Pistole said.
While he was running TSA during the Obama administration, Pistole said TSA introduced risk-based security.
He explained that can mean screening before a traveler is even at the airport, based on who they are and if they are on a watch list or should be on a watch list. The actual screening of a passenger should be one of the final layers of screening, he said.
“There’s no perfect security,” he said. “There’s no guarantee.”
Dennis Tajer is a pilot and spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association, the union that represents American Airlines’ pilots. He said he hasn’t encountered this situation at American, but says he hears about stowaway incidents across the industry including ones where stowaways are found inside the aircraft’s various compartments.
“Clearly, the system failed,” Tajer said. “No matter what airline it happened to.”
He said the union will want to hear from American Airlines about the lesson learned from the recent Delta incident.
“Crews are trained,” Tajer said. “We have procedures, and when security comes into call during flight, we have an entire team of security professionals on the ground to advise, to cross check and make sure that that airplane is kept secure and safe.”
James added that the reputations of airlines where these situations occur take a hit to some degree, with not only the breach in security, but also any traveler delays associated with the stowaway situation.
“The fact is that these incidents represent a major flaw in security processes, and so that can result in your customers not feeling safe, which can potentially result in a decline in ticket sales,” James said.
Kayyem hopes that airlines and the TSA will look at the Dali case and learn lessons about where the system failed.
“I think the lesson is that it really does fall on the original breach, which is once she got through security as a ticketed passenger,” Kayyam said, even though Dali did not have a ticket. “Everyone on the other side of that is making assumptions about how that person [made it to the gate.] … I’m not apologizing for Delta. They let her on a plane. I don’t even get how that happened.”
CNN’s Pete Muntean and Ray Sanchez contributed to this report.
