LOS ANGELES - Federal authorities on Thursday were trying to explain how a Nigerian American without a passport and clutching another traveler's expired boarding pass was able to get through layers of airport security-- and then avoid arrest for five days after officials discovered he was a stowaway.
On Friday, Virgin America Flight 415 from New York to Los Angeles was already two hours into its when a flight attendant asked Olajide Oluwaseun Noibi for his boarding pass and was surprised to see it was from a different fight and in someone else's name. She alerted authorities, and Noibi went back to sleep. When the plane landed, authorities chose not to arrest Noibi, allowing him to leave the airport.
On Wednesday, Noibi was arrested trying to board a Delta flight out of Los Angeles. Once again, he had managed to pass undetected through security with an expired ticket issued in someone else's name. Authorities found at least 10 other boarding passes, none of which belonged to him. Law enforcement sources said they suspect Noibi has used expired plane tickets to sneak on to flights in the past.
Aviation safety experts said they see several major breakdowns in security procedures. Transportation Security Agency and airline officials should have noticed the ticket was expired and not in Noibi's name when he boarded at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, they said. He was allowed on board by showing his expired University of Michigan ID card, even though college identification cards are not on the TSA's list of valid IDs.
Experts were also perplexed at why officials allowed Noibi to leave LAX after the plane landed when he had clearly violated laws. "Obviously the system did not work the way it was supposed to," said Brian Jenkins, a transportation security expert.
TSA officials said it was reviewing Noibi's case. But Virgin America acknowledged that its workers "may have missed an alert" in processing Noibi in New York.
Noibi was not on the list of passengers for the flight, which would be mandatory "for each paying passenger on every U.S. domestic flight," special agent Kevin Hogg wrote in an FBI affidavit. Virgin had no record of Noibi paying for his ticket.
Despite this, he was able to move past two checkpoints -- at the security screening area and at the gate -- with his expired ticket and university ID, something he replicated at LAX again on Tuesday.
