TSA waves passengers with wrong boarding passes through security

posted at 1:52 pm on November 29, 2011 by Howard Portnoy

The Transportation Security Administration recently celebrated its tenth birthday. Although the agency has gotten older, sadly it has not gotten wiser.

On Sunday, screeners at the Fort Lauderdale airport green lighted passenger, even though the boarding pass she presented had a name that was different from the one on her ID,Newsmax reports.

The passenger, Lindsey Dimattina, told a local TV station that the screener “looked at my driver’s license, then looked at my boarding pass with his flashlight … [then] signed off on the boarding pass.”

It was not until she had boarded the flight bound for New York’s LaGuardia Airport and attempted to claim her seat that she and another passenger with the same first name discovered the screeners’mistake:

A girl comes up to me and she goes, ‘I have seat 12D,’ and I go, ‘No, I have 12D,’ and so we called the stewardess over to help us and as we are waiting, we looked at our boarding passes and my boarding pass had her name on it. They let me through with someone else’s name.

The TSA issued a statement that reads in part:

Passengers are subject to a robust security system that employs multiple layers, including thorough screening of every passenger at the checkpoint, the presence of behavior detection officers, federal air marshals, armed pilots and a vigilant public, as well as many others, both seen and unseen.

The system is designed so if one layer of security does not meet our standards, there are many others in place to ensure the safety of the traveling public.

If those assurances don’t have you feeling all warm and cuddly as the busy holiday travel season approaches, then some reminders of TSA glitches past may help. In June, a Nigerian man was waved through security at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport despite having no valid passport or other identification and presenting an outdated boarding pass that, for good measure, had another passenger’s name.

Two months earlier at the same airport a man was not only cleared by security but actually boarded a flight with two box cutters in his carryon luggage. As a member of New York’s Port Authority Police Department mused at the time, “In case anyone has forgotten, the TSA was created because of a couple box cutter incidents.”

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