Man creatively sneaks onto Delta flight, but gets caught

> Why don't we trust the machines? Is it because they have bugs and are sometimes actually wrong? Or because we trust our feelings more?

I can't recommend enough to read the book "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety" by Eric Schlosser. You will be surprised how often we barely escaped nuclear war because wise people chose to not trust the machines.

> It's interesting that we use machines, and when they flag the type of error they were designed to identify, we simply assume they don't work.

The question is what's the incidence rate of real glitches. If the system errs on 1% of boarding passes, staff will be used to overriding it.

In this specific case, it's quite possible that the gate agent, being a costumer service worker, didn't want a fuss. If someone comes to a gate agent with a boarding pass, they're most likely not double-spending the pass, and suggesting otherwise to them would be a quick way to a tweet saying "today I bought a plane ticket, and when I tried boarding I was told I already boarded and they refused to reimburse me, do not fly [airline]". Of course it would have been the "correct" course of action here but as someone who has interacted with The Public, the gate agent did their best.

With this comment you've demonstrated why voting machines will never be trusted fully; lack of understanding.

You understand paper and pen. It's right there. A child fully understands the dynamic.

As soon as the process moves into a machine, you cannot even tell if your checkmark is really counted.

This is doubly worked into distrust, by the amount of bugs, weird isses, and strange behaviour software exhibits to end users. People are trained from youth, via personal experience, how incredibly buggy and untrustworthy computers are.

They crash, can lose data, be wrong, and the worst of it? The layman cannot even figure out why. Computers are a black box, a mystery, they function by magic.

No expert, no claims of audits, or oversight, will ever, ever refute what end users know. Computers make mistakes all the time.

Taking these impressions and incorporating them into the votng system is madness for democracy.

My guess it had happened a few times in the past and had always been "glitches" or passenger doing something silly which also gets blamed as a "glitch".

Well the passenger actually _hadn’t_ boarded. Someone else had. Their checks found the extra passenger afterwards.

The mistake was letting the original passenger on and that was fixed later.

This is because we don't have a plausible scenario for that case. "Sir, you already boarded the plane, please leave the airport" is not going to work. Calling the police, making a fuss with getting all the people off the plane and then back on is a lot of damage for the company in late flights and missing connections.

> Why don't we trust the machines?

We don't trust the machines because some of us aren't outsourcing their critical thinking faculties. If this person assumed it was a computer glitch that probably means that it happened before and they guessed, probably correctly, that glitches happen more often than people trying to reuse boarding passes

This is an individual in a specific situation. I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head why they might have done what they did.

Most importantly, there might not even be a standard process to follow here - remember this passenger was properly ticketed. There previously was a glitch. The agent probably didn't want to deal with angry passengers (there was a fight between passengers and a Delta agent in the past couple years).

It's true the system may have glitched in the past, but IMO the bigger issue is that the system provides no troubleshooting steps. What if it snapped a photo of every passenger as it scanned their ticket. Then on a duplicate scan it could display the photo of the passenger who already scanned the ticket. That could help the gate agent to actually troubleshoot the warning and figure out what happened.

I came within a cat's whisker of being flown from Molde, Norway to Oslo rather than to my intended destination of Bergen when I was a teen.

Molde Airport is a very small affair, a handful of flights every day, and no such fancy thing as boarding tunnels; rather, you were just passed through at the gate and let onto the apron, where a plane would be waiting.

Only on that day, there were TWO planes waiting, one hidden from view behind a hangar - but both were from then national flag carrier Braathens.

So, I get out from my gate as the very last passenger, having bought a standby ticket, so no pax to follow, lemmings style, to my plane.

Walking over to single plane in view, I board and find my seat on the nearly empty flight, door closes, pre-departure briefing, taxiing towards runway.

And then they announce that estimated flight time to Oslo will be 45 minutes. Uh, Oslo?

So, I call for a stewardess, who suggests that whatever I may need, just wait until we're airborne. 'Uh, that's kind of the point - I am going to BERGEN, not Oslo.'

She runs off to alert the captain, and a minute or two later, a truck with boarding stairs come zipping alongside, I disembark, get driven over to the plane to Bergen and as I board the correct plane, a guy is getting off the Bergen-bound plane and is driven over to the plane I had just left.

As we both had stumbled onto the wrong plane, the tally matched the expected numbers and all seemed normal - until they'd announced where we were actually going, that is.

A family member managed to do this. Both flights were packed, but somehow their seat was empty in the other flight, so didn't notice.

Both flights were going to Cyprus, one to Greek side other to Turkish side, boarding at the same time from adjacent gates... Great move British Airways!

The plane they should have gotten on got delayed for many hours because they had a missing passenger so had to remove the stowed luggage[0] after giving up waiting. However they somehow didn't catch the extra passenger in the other plane.

Now this wasn't too long after the tumultuous events[1] in 1974, and so tension was still high between the two sides. So when my family member naively tried to cross the border to get to where they were going, they were assumed to be a spy and got held for interrogation.

After a couple of days of really intense interrogation they got to cross the buffer zone[2], being told in no uncertain terms never ever to come back to the Turkish side.

[0]: edit I'm pretty sure this was before the Lockerbie bombing, in any case I do recall my parents telling me they were worried about the "surprise luggage" being a bomb.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_invasion_of_Cyprus

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Buffer_Zone_in_...

I always secretly hope I get on the wrong plane and end up somewhere fun. It does seem like it can happen from time to time since Ryanair now always informs "if you are on the wrong plane tell us!".

We had a company executive get-together outside of London a few years ago, so many of us were flying out the same evening on different flights from Boston. I knew my ticket was Delta and on an A330, so when we all left the lounge to go to our flights, I glanced outside, saw the Delta A330 and the sign that said London, so I queued up and kept chatting with colleagues.

Boarding scan rejected my boarding pass with a red light and loud buzz and I had to walk-of-shame in front of my colleagues down to my actual gate (which was leaving around an hour and a half later, IIRC).

I've nearly done this as well. Late night stop over in Singapore, went to the wrong gate, flight attendent waved me through despite the pass 'not scanning' and it was only a senior person who waved me down to check that stopped me - I was already strolling to the flight.

Had a flight where the pilots on multiple announcements said the wrong destination and I was about to jump off. I knew I went through the right gate but definitely confusing. Pilots caught their mistake and had a good laugh.

Kevin McAllister?

You don't need that much tech. When the second copy of a boarding pass scans, you double check with that person, maybe there's a good reason (scanned pass, but had to leave the line for some reason). If it doesn't make sense, ask the flight attendants to audit seats. Also summon security.

The suspect is on the plane and can't easily leave, presuming the real passenger is the one who presents second.

On all flights I have taken the flight attendants count the passengers on board before taxiing and check the lavatories. This method wouldn't have worked even with available free seats.

That just reminded me... This actually happened to me. I scanned my boarding pass to enter security at Heathrow and it didn't work. I had to a special desk and they had a picture of someone who had apparently already gone through security using my pass. I didn't recognise the face at all. I completely forgot about it until this moment. I guess I was allowed through after showing ID etc. At the time I probably thought it was a "glitch" but maybe someone photographed my pass? I'm always quite careful with stuff like that, though, so not sure.

In Europe all flights require you to show an ID at the gate. Usually they just throw a quick look (no big delay), but something like this is harder to pull off. Always amazed how much there is talk about "security" in US (TSA, border control, all 3 letter agencies, etc.) and then basic stuff is done a bit ... lax.

In US, quite often on international flights now they just use camera to scan you and let you in without even presenting the boarding pass. It’s not rolled out everywhere yet, but it’s pretty surreal to use.

Or you can check id at the gate

This would seem to only work with unsuspecting gate agents that assume that an "already boarded" message must be due to an accidental double-scan (which is presumably the cause 99% of the time), not somebody different already having boarded using a copy of that same boarding pass.

One simple solution could be to show a different kind of warning for a double scan that's immediately repeated, and one that had at least one other pass scanned in between, requiring greater scrutiny.

The way it works in Europe is you scan the QR code, gate agent gets a green light and the name of the passenger, and checks that both your name and photo on your passport match.

There is a much simpler solution: check ID of the passenger, verify name & photo, plus take note of the seat number. If somebody comes with same seat number, investigate.

> My back seat driver solution: have cameras that takes a picture of the person presenting the boarding pass, the shutter is triggered by the pass scanner. If a pass is scanned twice, bring up the photo of the person who scanned it the first time and grab them. But it's a whole lot of tech to solve a problem that probably rarely happens.

Or do what is done all over Europe, even for domestic flights: check the passport at the same time as the boarding pass at the gate.

Some international flights have face scanners at the gate. Not sure if it's to take a photo in the event of an issue or an actual scan and comparison against your stored ID, but the length of the process (a few seconds) suggests the latter.

If it glitches just ask for photo ID. Why add all the complexity and inconvenience of taking a photo of every passenger when they’re already all required to have photo ID?

Still quite possible, just boarded a flight that had two gates past the final check, you could (not entirely easily, but quite accidentally) switch if both were active.

I haven't flown southwest in a very long time. Do they still use the plastic boarding passes they give you when checking in?

Imagine what kind of sleazeball you have to be, to take an expensive gift with your friend's name on it, and use it to commit a federal crime.

That said, what's the point of the buddy pass system, if it's not guaranteed? Who goes to the airport, through security and checkin, thinking "maybe I'll fly today, maybe not, maybe I'll fly somewhere else, whatever's available, you know?"

All the alternatives I can think of are extremely time-intensive - you'd have to go back to everyone who already scanned in and check their id against their boarding pass. That would add significant delays in taking off, which could cost the airline a lot of money in ripple effects throughout the day and will certainly cost the gate agents a lot of hassle and ill-will from customers.

It's a good question as to whether they have a protocol for this; if the scanner is prone to making mistakes even 1 in a 1000 times, that's every few flights, several times a day. It wouldn't be worth it to the airline to have a time-intensive protocol to check.

> you can enter the secure area without a boarding pass

I never understood why this isn't the case everywhere. You can always just buy a cheap ticket (Ryanair sells seats for as little as €15) and not board. The barrier to entry is so low that I can't imagine it accomplishes much from a security point of view.

Sounds quite similar to domestic flights in New Zealand.

It used to be well known in the USA before they changed security that if you knew the airlines and flight patterns you could fly for free, by just getting on non full flights.

He was only discovered once the plane was taxiing, which doesn't sound like it pretty much worked - if the flight hadn't been full, he may well have got away with it.

Except in this case, it didn't?

1. The ID should be checked along (and preferably) before the boarding pass is scanned. Most airlines do this; so this is an oversight from the agent to "quickly" let people through.

2. The agent was also lazy to investigate the situation and just assumed it was a "computer glitch". Again, probably breaking procedure.

This could have been worse but I wonder what's the point of all the security theater that the US goes through when simple security procedures are not strictly followed.

Assuming the flight crew does a passenger count or checks seats that should be unoccupied, even a non-full flight would result in getting caught.

That's why ID's get checked at the boarding gate, so this trick wouldn't have been possible at many airports around europe at least. Not checking ID's seems somewhat irresponsible from a security perspective.

Yeah at this point it is much easier to exploit human flaws than computer flaws.

I think the crew counts people and then checks lavatory as part of the procedure. I have an old gizmo that is like a pocket watch but serves to count (clicker) things. I have seen many airlines doing this procedure..

Banning lavatory use during boarding is the wrong response to this.

Why not just check then lock the toilets during takeoff?

Alternative solution: check bathrooms before leaving

I wonder how much experience he has flying commercial. The seat maps aren't particularly accurate because some are under gate control, or some are inop, etc. He could have probably estimated the chances of being at capacity based on the standby list and just the general attitudes of people hanging around the gate. A fully sold flight is almost certainly going to have standbys hovering to get confirmed. That should've been the clue.

In fairness, Chile has some of the most laid-back air travel norms I've seen in the world. I loved it in my time there.

Occupation lights are typically driven by the lock, not by some sensor that would detect a bodily presence

The article mentions that he did not lock the door while in the lavatory. Once the flight took off, he then went to the other lavatory where he did lock the door.

Showing IDs would work, but also training employees not to assume a warning is a glitch would have prevented him from boarding. If they took the time verify that the original person had already scanned their ticket, they would have noticed something was wrong.

EDIT: this is assuming that the warning is not routinely ignored (i.e. there's actually a bug in the system and it would slow down boarding time since it happens so frequently.) If that were the case... they should fix their system lol

Apple isn't the richest company on earth because they pay for flights like chumps.

> the man apparently is an Apple accountant

Formerly, it seems.

Not the case for internal/domestic flights in New Zealand, and I presume it's similar for other countries. Only on international flights do I see regaular requests for passports for understandable reasons.

Spotted the fellow European

The buddy pass was for a different flight on a different airline.

The buddy pass is only for Southwest flights, so he opted to take another airline.

Ya, it’s so strange that he thought through a relatively creative (though illegal) solution, only to be caught up by the obvious problem.

FWIW bad actors have been doing the same thing for ages with passwords, passcodes, key combinations, physical keys, etc.

Easy mitigation, don't let the same barcode board twice.

But it also places undue financial burden on passengers. Not everyone has an NFC-capable phone, and the workaround (paper tickets) is what we already do.

As an aside, Ticketmaster is miserable to deal with.

Not every phone has NFC capability. Every smartphone has a screen though, making scanning a barcode more accessible, and able to fallback to printing if the phone runs out of battery.

What about someone whose phone died? Not an irregular occurrence with transfers, missing foreign adapters etc.

NFC is a lot more work to implement when you already need barcode scanners for paper tickets.

Paper is just so reliable.

The last time I attempted to use a mobile boarding pass, the app failed to load the pass¹. I later figured out why: the airport's WiFi was MitM'ing the connection, and instead of letting an AJAX request for the boarding pass through, it wanted to serve ads. A paper boarding pass won't try to transmute itself into an ad at the moment of "Papers please."

Nobody wants to be doing that in TSA, of all places.

And if you're checking baggage at all, then you more or less get the paper pass for free.

¹…you can screenshot the pass to work around this. But now we're getting a bit closer to what the guy in the OP did!

As with most things security: expecting security to be the problem of the other part(y|ies) is a recipe to security problems. Airlines need to make secure systems and processes, passengers need to try to protect their information. No amount of "well I'm the paying customer" means you completely stop playing any role in your own security.

I.e. saying you should be careful with how you display your boarding pass isn't the same thing as saying the airline's process has no blame.

A guy I know had to download an app to scan his passports RFID tag recently to verify, of all things, his LinkedIn profile.

I’m no expert, and don’t know what sort of information that exposes, but I definitely grimaced at the thought when he was telling me the steps he took to verify.

Not for that flight or even airline.

I would bet my car that this isn't the first time he tried pulling this off, just the first time he got caught.

Are these passes airline specific?

I read that too when it happened.

The OP mentioned that other passengers saw this stowaway taking photos of boarding passes in line, contrary to the article linked at the top here.

"No one noticed this at the time, but rather this was only uncovered using security camera footage after the fact"

Its the same thing as “flying standby.” The gate agent will issue boarding passes during or shortly after everyone else hasboarded based on remaining non revenue (“dead head”) seats being available.

didn't the article say he was snapping photos of other people's boarding passes?

Don't know about the US, but some airports with a significant retail presence post-security allow non-passengers through to shop/eat etc. As a kid I remember my parents coming through security to send me off on a flight by myself in Australia.

I've never had my ID checked boarding a domestic flight in the US. ID and sometimes boarding pass are checked at the TSA checkpoint before the gates.

I've learned to just skip paragraphs online with extreme prejudice, and it makes it hard for me to read text that's online and feels like an article, but is actually very educational (like recently the HTML version of The Rust Programming Language).

People who comment without reading the article are likely the vast majority I'm afraid.

Yes! What's next? People boarding busses without paying? Or trains? They should all be sentenced.

He didn’t sneak onto the same flight as that he had a ticket for. He sneaked onto a flight for a completely different airline.

Modern software is so cumbersome and bug prone that people just presume bugs instead of the software doing its job.

> He made sure that he boarded before the the passenger who had the boarding pass information that he stole; when the other passenger tried to board, the system suggested that this passenger had already boarded, though the gate agent assumed it was a glitch, so allowed that person to board

The article mentions that it did detect the duplicate. What surprised me is that the airline does not check the ID at same time as the boarding pass. I mostly fly internationally, but I can’t remember ever boarding without showing both my boarding pass and my passport, and the agent verifying the match. I guess domestically this is more of a challenge because there is no standard ID document to request passengers show at the gate? Still, surely they could ask for the same document shown at security… but maybe that would cause problems with customers who have esoteric form of ID that the TSA recognizes as legitimate but a gate agent might find suspicious.

It's mentioned that the agent thought this to be a glitch and let the actual person board anyway.

Hmm - flouting regulations cause the rules only apply for others, selfish with seeming no regard for any negative impact to others…sounds like a future executive indeed

How though? the airplane was full.

Also would make a pretty decent terrorist, by the same criterion.

Yeah, he should totally apply to YC. Probably graduated from Stanford and part of the Forbes 30 under 30.

From the article:

"He made sure that he boarded before the the passenger who had the boarding pass information that he stole; when the other passenger tried to board, the system suggested that this passenger had already boarded, though the gate agent assumed it was a glitch, so allowed that person to board"

How did we veer off into age discrimination exactly?

> stealing

Assuming there were an empty seat, could this really be considered stealing?

I have never had my ID checked at the gate on a domestic flight, only by TSA at security or at the ticketing counter when checking bags.