Someone Boarded a Plane at Heathrow Without a Ticket or Passport

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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).

Clive Robonson • December 18, 2025 12:52 PM

@ Bruce, ALL,

Also look at,

https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/man-boarded-plane-from-heathrow-and-flew-to-jfk-without-ticket-or-passport

JFK USA Just last year… Not Oslo Norway.

I guess a little digging might pull up many more. Of which some will if they at least have a passport will walk on through…

Back when wearing the Green we had “Mod Form 90” id’s that we could use instead of passports under certain circumstances. A friend tells a quite funny story of parachuting into a western european nation as part of an excercise and busting a bone. Got sent to a civilian hospital that patched him up, even though he was in full field kit and carrying a rifle.

He had to come back on a civy flight and a ticket was arranged. But the problem of the rifle remained…

I won’t spoil the story, just say he had to “gift wrap it” not hecause the European nation particularly cared, but the UK was kind of funny about people wandering around with semi-autos.

Because there was some kind of miss communication he had to make his own way back from the airport (Heathrow again) and as he only had a small amount of money went to his house where tuckered out he stayed and slept over night. The following day was a Saturday and he tried phoning various people in the regiment but they had all gone home…

Come monday morning he phoned again to discover he was apparently “not missed” and it was only when he said he still had the rifle did people suddenly get serious…

Any way a few moths later we and others were acting as extras for the film Full Metal Jacket that was getting filmed in the old Beckton Gas Works in East London and we were running around with rifles that we both knew were let’s just say not deactivated…

But further fun fact a few years after that, I was given an “Engineering Intern” at work to look after. I vaguely recognised him and chatting one lunch I realised that he was “Tan Hung Francione” (the Pimp on the Motorbike in the film).

We had a good laugh over it. Oh and the reason he could be an intern, was that he had a side gig as a night club entertainer.

lurker • December 18, 2025 3:49 PM

@Clive Robinson, ALL
“passport control officers …. are just ordinary people.”

Back in the ’70s a flight from southern Europe arrived at Brussells. We were directed to an inbound passport check with two gates; both had the velvet rope on its hook “preventing” casual passage. The two officers were having a private discussion about pay rates and holidays which went on for over a minute as the pax piled up behind us. Eventually a gentleman swore loudly in French and lifted the rope off its hook. Everybody just walked into Belgium, including any terrorists among us,
while the two officers snuck off through a private side door …

Clive Robonson • December 18, 2025 5:44 PM

@ lurker,

Hmm the 1970’s I vaguely remember them as being the time of Hijackers seizing aircraft at gun point with outrageous demands and flights to strange countries to land at.

Maybe if Governments had acted a little more responsibly back then 9/11 would not have been able to happen three decades later.

Yeh I know “whataboutism”… But consider the only real difference between aircraft pre and post that event is the strength of cockpit doors and the fact they are kept locked…

Schneier on Security

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