Someone Boarded a Plane at Heathrow Without a Ticket or Passport

I’m sure there’s a story here:

Sources say the man had tailgated his way through to security screening and passed security, meaning he was not detected carrying any banned items.

The man deceived the BA check-in agent by posing as a family member who had their passports and boarding passes inspected in the usual way.

Tags: air travel, social engineering

Posted on December 18, 2025 at 11:41 AM • 1 Comments

Clive Robinson • December 18, 2025 12:12 PM

@ Bruce, ALL,

It wouldn’t be the first and I strongly suspect it won’t be the last.

In part because not all flights have assigned seats it’s left to the flight attendants, and often the “head count” is not checked against the actual passenger list…

I’ve mentioned before that due to a mistake very early one morning in a Hotel during check-out I was given a friends passport and they got mine. We traveled all the way back home and nobody picked up on it.

On putting my passport away with travel recipts, I then saw it was not my passport but my friends. I phoned him and asked him to check… A little later we swapped them back over a cup of tea and a conversation to work out where it had gone wrong.

As I’ve said before, it’s the reason I don’t trust “eye witness identification and verification” passport control officers are supposedly experts/professionals (the reality is they are just ordinary people)… So if they can miss it, then what can you expect of people who have never been asked to do “eye witness identification and verification”?

Oh and don’t think biometric systems are any better –they are not– and I strongly susspect Current AI LLM snd ML Systems that get repurposed won’t be any better (in fact I suspect a lot worse).