A Norwegian man managed to sneak aboard two flights in as many days without a ticket after tailgating other passengers at Munich International Airport in Germany, according to local media reports. On the second occasion, police discovered he was armed with a knife.
The bizarre stowaway story began on August 4 when the man managed to bypass ticket checks at Munich Airport’s Terminal 2 and snuck onboard a plane without ground staff noticing.
On this occasion, the man’s ploy was quickly discovered when cabin crew realized there wasn’t a spare seat for him to sit in on the fully booked flight. The German Federal Police were called and the man was removed from the plane.
It appears that police cited the 39-year-old suspect but later released him. The following day, the man returned to Munich Airport and tried, successfully, to get onboard a plane undetected.
The man is believed to have used the same technique to tailgate passengers through both the security checkpoint and the boarding gate unnoticed by security or airline staff before settling into a spare seat aboard a Lufthansa flight to Stockholm.
Despite not having a boarding pass in his possession, Lufthansa flight LH2418 departed Munich as scheduled, bound for the Swedish capital, Stockholm.
The flight landed in Stockholm without incident nearly two hours later, and it was only then that the cabin crew became suspicious of the Norwegians, who told them that he wanted to fly straight back to Munich.
It was at this point that the crew made the discovery that they had a stowaway onboard and Swedish police were called to the plane to investigate. Once in the custody of local law enforcement, a 10 cm long knife was found in the man’s possession, according to German newspaper Bild.
Both Munich Airport and the German federal police say they are investigating how the man managed to evade security and boarding checks, while Lufthansa did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In March, 26-year-old Wicliff Yves Fleurizard managed to sneak onboard a Delta Air Lines plane in Salt Lake City after he secretly took a photo of a young girl’s mobile boarding pass to get past gate agents unnoticed.
Fleurizard was, however, discovered before departure when he tried to find a spare seat, only to find that the plane was fully booked. Fleurizard told prosecutors that he had been trying to get home with Southwest Airlines using a friend’s buddy pass but each flight he tried to get on was oversold.
In the end, Fleurizard says he was so desperate to get home that he decided to sneak onboard the Delta flight rather than buy a new ticket. The elaborate ploy has ended with Fleurizard being indicted with a slew of national security crimes.
Earlier this year, another man managed to sneak onboard a British Airways plane at London Heathrow and was only discovered after the flight had landed at New York JFK.
In that case, the suspect was stopped by US Customs and Border Protection and sent back to London, where he was charged with a slew of aviation offenses, including boarding an aircraft without permission, being unlawfully airside, and obtaining services by deception.
TOTH: One Mile at a Time
