A 27-year-old man has pleaded guilty to sneaking onboard a Delta Air Lines flight at Salt Lake City last March and attempting to hide in a lavatory before he was eventually busted by flight attendants as the plane was taxiing for takeoff.
Wicliff Yves Fleurizard was arrested in March 2024 on suspicion of being a stowaway on an aircraft after he used an ingenious technique to get past gate agents and onto the Airbus A320 aircraft without anyone noticing.
Surveillance camera footage taken from Salt Lake City Airport showed how Fleurizard moved around the crowd of passengers waiting to board Delta flight DL1683 to Austin and surreptitiously attempted to take photos of their mobile boarding passes using his cell phone camera.
Fleurizard eventually managed to take a photo of the QR code on a young girl’s mobile boarding pass and then used this photo to scan himself through the gate and onto the plane without raising any suspicion.
Once on the plane, Fleurizard immediately hid in a lavatory and remained there until everyone else had boarded the plane.
Fleurizard had hoped that he could exit the lavatory once everyone had boarded and take any empty seat, but what he hadn’t accounted for was that the flight was fully booked, and there wasn’t a spare seat onboard.
After walking the entire length of the aisle, Fleurizard hid in a lavatory at the back of the plane before coming back out to have a second look for a spare seat. At this point, a flight attendant stopped Fleurizard and, using a mobile device, searched the passenger manifest and discovered that he didn’t have a ticket to be onboard.
Fleurizard told investigators that he had been trying to get back home to Florida and was using non-rev privileges from a friend working at Southwest Airlines. Every Southwest flight he had attempted to get on, however, was fully booked, and he ended up being bumped to the next flight.
Out of desperation, Fleurizard then came up with a madcap plan to get on a Delta flight to Austin and continue his journey from there.
In the plea agreement reached with prosecutors, Fleurizard has admitted to being a stowaway on an aircraft, which carries a maximum sentence of five years imprisonment plus a fine of $250,000.
Last November, another Delta stowaway managed to sneak onboard a transatlantic flight from New York JFK bound for Paris, France, and then hid in the onboard toilets for the majority of the flight before flight attendants eventually became suspicious and challenged her.
The flight was also fully booked, but the serial stowaway stayed in the toilets undetected for hours on end.
Following the incident, the TSA said it was urgently investigating how the stowaway managed to get past the boarding pass check undetected. The under-fire agency did, however, insist that the stowaway was subject to standard security checks.
