This weekend, a nine-year-old boy from the Twin Cities somehow managed to sneak through security at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and board a Delta flight to Minneapolis--without a ticket.
The boy went through security with all other passengers, the Transportation Security Administration said in a statement, but officials are still trying to figure out how he did it -- and how he then got on the flight.
Patrick Hogan, a spokesman for Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, said the crew of Delta Flight 1651 "became suspicious of the child's circumstances" during the flight from Minneapolis to Las Vegas. Crew members got in touch with authorities in Las Vegas and turned the boy over to Child Protective Services, Hogan said in a statement.
"Fortunately, the flight crew took appropriate actions to ensure the child's safety, so the story does have a good ending," he said.
Delta said it takes the incident "very seriously" and is working with authorities.
Watch CNN's full piece
here to show just how many levels the boy managed to pass through before getting on the plane without anyone raising eyebrows.
The boy somehow managed to get through the TSA checkpoint and went through the gate and made it all the way on the plane without anyone asking questions. It wasn't until the plane was in the air that the flight crew noticed the boy's name wasn't on the list of unaccompanied minors and alerted Las Vegas police.
Terry Trippler, an airline safety expert who runs The Plane Rules, an online database of tips for leisure travelers, thinks that Delta is primarily responsible for this snafu because the gate agent should have been the first one to notice there was something amiss, since the boy didn't have a ticket. However, I have to fault the TSA as well. While he was too young to have ID, how in the world does the TSA screener not notice there's a little boy coming through the checkpoint without a ticket?