PHOTO: Southwest aircraft parked at Terminal A at San Jose International Airport. (Courtesy of Wikipedia)
San Jose International Airport appears to have a concerning security problem after a second stowaway incident in four months.
Marilyn Jean Hartman, 62, was arrested Monday at Los Angeles International Airport after successfully sneaking past security and a gate agent in San Jose, and boarding a Southwest Airlines flight.
She was only noticed after the plane landed at LAX and flight attendants did a head count for anybody who was remaining on the plane that continued on to Phoenix. When flight attendants realized there was one more passenger than what was listed on the manifest, they asked everyone to show their boarding pass. Hartman could not produce hers and was taken off the plane and arrested.
Many are asking the obvious questions, including how the woman was able to get past TSA security lines without a boarding pass. The incident has become an embarrassing issue for San Jose International, coming four months after a teenager was able to breach security by climbing over a fence and onto the tarmac, stowing away in the wheel well of a plane headed to Hawaii. Miraculously, he survived the 5 ½ hour flight to Maui.
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But in this instance, Hartman was a known stowaway who was placed on probation in February for trying to board three separate flights to Hawaii on three different days at San Francisco International. On one of those attempts, she somehow made it all the way to plane and was sitting in a ticketed passenger's seat. When she couldn't produce a boarding pass, she was removed from the flight before takeoff and arrested.
U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) told the San Jose Mercury News that the incident was troubling.
"Yesterday's incident of an unticketed passenger successfully taking a flight from San Jose to Los Angeles was an apparent failure by both airport security and the airline of protecting passengers from a potential threat to their safety," Swalwell said. "People want to be assured when they fly that only screened and ticketed passengers are on their flight. (Hartman) is a known plane hopper. She is someone that airport officials should be looking for. I don't think we need to spend more money to be a little bit smarter about how we go through security. It needs to be one person at a time, one boarding pass at a time."
Southwest Airlines said it was investigating the incident. In a statement on its website, San Jose International said it is "assisting our partners in their investigation of an unticketed passenger who was screened at the TSA security checkpoint and boarded a Southwest Airlines flight to Los Angeles on August 4, 2014. The Airport's security systems and processes were not a factor in this incident and public safety was never compromised."
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