A 9-year-old Minneapolis boy was able
to get through security and onto a plane to Las Vegas at
Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport without a ticket, an airport
spokesman revealed on Sunday.
Security
officials screened the boy, whose exploits echo the Leonardo DiCaprio
film Catch Me If You Can, at the airport shortly after 10:30 a.m.
Thursday, Metropolitan Airports Commission spokesman Patrick Hogan said.
The as-yet unnamed boy slipped
though a security checkpoint on Thursday morning and then boarded Delta
Flight 1651 that left Minneapolis-St. Paul for Las Vegas at 11:15 a.m.
A 9-year-old runaway passed through this
security checkpoint at Minneapolis airport last Thursday without a
ticket and flew to Las Vegas
Flight crew became suspicious and contacted Las Vegas police, who met
the crew upon landing and transferred the boy to child protection
services, Hogan said
According to officials, a security
video also shows the boy at the airport terminal on Wednesday, the day
BEFORE he took his ticketless trip to Vegas.
He
took a bag from the carousel that did not belong to him and ordered
lunch at a restaurant outside of the security checkpoints, Hogan said.
He ate and then told the server he had to use the bathroom, left the bag and never returned to pay.
The owner of the bag was identified and the bag was returned to him, Hogan said.
At this point, this is a Delta and [Transport Security Administration] issue,' Hogan said. 'This is a rare incident.'
In a statement sent to Minneapolis television station KARE-11, Delta officials said, 'We are investigating the incident and cooperating with the agencies involved.'
KARE-11 reported that authorities believe the 9-year-old boy is a runaway from the Twin Cities.
'He had to pass three levels of security,' Terry Trippler, an air travel expert with ThePlaneRules.com, told the television station.
'You have the TSA, the gate agents, and the flight crew and a child comes through without even a seat assignment.'
Tippler said that security introduced after 9/11 obviously still has major flaws.
'While we are safer in the air, this proves there are still gaping holes,' he said.
According to a surveillance video,
at 10:37 a.m., the unaccompanied boy arrived at the airport on a
southbound light-rail car, the Daily News has reported.
The
boy was then screened at Terminal 1 and granted access to its nine
airlines despite appearing to have never produced a required ticket.
In
an apparently well-thought out plan that has similarities to the Steve
Spielberg-directed movie, at one point the boy is believed to have
blended in with another family traveling through the airport to evade
detection.
The boy's
parents told Minneapolis Police they 'hadn’t seen much of him today'
when officers arrived at the missing child's residence Thursday after he
was reported having run away, according to CBS Minneapolis.
Catch Me If You Can was based on the
real-life exploits of Frank Abagnale, a teenage con-artist who, among
many other scams, traveled the world posing as a Pan Am pilot.
'The
fact that the child's actions weren't detected until he was in flight
is concerning,' said Hogan, who added that producing identification for
children is not a requirement of travel.
'More
than 33 million people travel through Minneapolis-St. Paul
International Airport every year and I don't know of another instance in
my 13 years at the airport in which anything similar has happened.
'Fortunately,
the flight crew took appropriate actions to ensure the child's safety,
so the story does have a good ending,' Hogan said.
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police spokesman Bill Cassell told ABC News the boy was 'more worldly than most nine-year-old kids.'
'He
was able to get onto an airline where he didn't have a ticket and made
it five states across the U.S.,' Cassell said. 'If it hadn't been for
alert airline employees on our end, he probably never would have been
discovered.'
The station reported that Las Vegas police, Hennepin County authorities and the boy's parents are working together.
A
statement on the TSA's website said that the federal funding shutdown
meant no information on the incident would be immediately available
online.
dailymail.co.uk
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