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 realized 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.
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.
When they arrived to the gate, the pilot got on the intercom to tell passengers to stay in their seats.
‘I fly a lot, and it was unusual for that to be happening just as we were landing,’ Jackson told The New York Times.
Moments later, the pilot told passengers: ‘We’re just waiting for the police to come on board.’
The captain reportedly 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.
‘We somehow flew all the way from New York to Paris with a stowaway. This woman somehow got on the plane and hid in a lavatory during takeoff and wasn’t detected until we were about to land,’ Jackson wrote on his Instagram story.
Six or seven officers arrived on board to remove the woman, causing passengers to be stuck on board for an extra 40 minutes, according to The Times.
It is unclear if the woman was arrested or not.
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.’
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Queens District Attorney’s Office in New York are looking into the matter, according to The Times.
