N830MH

Different lady. Repeat stowaway bypasses at security without a ticket and then she sneak on the plane again. Crazy lady!

https://www.8newsnow.com/investigato...rKt4Cuu_FXd8zE

She got arrested at LAS airport. She flew from LAX to LAS without a ticket. She's breach security. She was not supposed to be there.

Boggie Dog

Besides the questions of getting past TSA and the gate agents undetected aren't stowaways pretty lucky to pick a flight with an open seat? Everything I've been on recently have been fully loaded.

guv1976

"Paging Mrs. Quonsett, Mrs. Ada Quonsett. Please pick up the nearest white courtesy phone."

nd2010

It’s guaranteed that over 50 people bypass TSA every day nationwide. Some airports make it so easy such as an elevator from the sterile area to baggage claim.

Boggie Dog

Has been my observation that entry points to secured areas of an airport are monitored.

Section 107

I will assume you mean 50 actual passengers bypass TSA PSCs into a sterile area everyday and that you are not meaning airport workers using their SIDA credentials (appropriately) to bypass the PSCs. Care to back that up that guarantee with any specifics (such as an actual airport with such an elevator arrangement) or a report which gives data supporting such a claim?

Because otherwise I believe that is quite simply not happening. The security program simply does not permit such circumstances and a lot of people spend a lot of time verifying and pen-testing each airport's program. I think you will find that any elevator accessible from a non-sterile area will not open up into a sterile area but rather somewhere just outside a PSC or a security door. Doors leading from a non-sterile/non-SIDA area into the SIDA (the sterile area is inside SIDA) are required to have a card reader for the door to open (can also be opened by LE/Fire/EMS with a physical key in an emergency circumstance but the card is faster to use and such an emergency will be exceedingly rare and such an opening would be recorded). Piggybacking is of course always possible but is prohibited, monitored and actually easily detected by security operations.

YadiMolina

Absolutely no study to support this, but TSA screens 2 million passengers a day over hundreds of airports, so it wouldn't surprise me if 50 unscreened passengers (0.0025%) get to the secure area somehow without any intent to bypass security. Can humans perform any process 2 million times perfectly? (And then consider the processes, e.g., that agent stationed at the exit watching people file past.)

Boggie Dog

The statement by nd2010, is what is being questioned. It's not how TSA screens but how that number of people could bypass TSA screening each day, every day. We know some people have bypassed security and even boarded aircraft. That points to failures with the airport, airlines, and TSA.

N830MH

I have no problem at all. I have non-SIDA badge. I have blue badge. When I done at work. I work the warehouse down on the streets near airport. I work for Paradies shops. When I visit airport and I take a city bus there. I look into the concourse. I was looking for my old coworker. She’s off on Friday. She still work for HMS Host.

WillCAD

That's an apples to baseballs comparison. How many people are screened at checkpoints has no relationship to how many people are able to breach the sterile area without going through the checkpoint.

However, even without data to back it up, I would not be surprised if the number of people who gain unauthorized access to sterile areas across the US is in the tens per week. Airports range in size from large to small, but a lot of them are big facilities with multiple buildings, presenting a pretty significant challenge to keep secure, especially given the complex nature of the crowds of people who need to gain entrance - airline workers, support contractors, concession vendors, repair and maintenance personnel, and of course the millions of travelers and their millions of bags and parcels, all of which need to be screened.

Unlike most FTers, I'm not a frequent flier. My experience is limited to a handful of airports, all medium to large and all in the US. But I can certainly see where a terminal's layout might have vulnerabilities, particularly if the local security is lax and doors are not properly alarmed and/or monitored. I would guess that such problems are most common at older airports whose design predates 9/11, especially smaller airports with lower budgets for security operations and improvements to close loopholes.

Section 107

I think some distinctions are helpful: between total people across all airports and passengers; bypassing (which I am reading as implying inappropriate/unauthorized access) and authorized entry; and between the SIDA and the sterile area. Sterile (e.g. terminal) areas get dumped and planes offloaded if someone "bypasses TSA" and enters the sterile area inappropriately. Based upon the numbers suggested, terminals would be getting dumped at least once a week and constantly in the news. It simply isn't happening into the sterile area. Even these stowaways are not bypassing TSA - they are getting screened (they just shouldn't have been screened in the first place). Whether someone was properly/effectively screened is an altogether different issue.

Certainly people get into the SIDA inappropriately - if they didn't then airport security programs would not put so much emphasis on training employees to be vigilant, to challenge anyone not displaying a badge properly, and on conducting pen testing and providing financial incentives for employees who correctly respond to the pen testing (Bogus Bob/Babs, etc. programs).

Based on sheer numbers, yeah, 50 a day inappropriately accessing the SIDA across all TSA controlled airports might sound reasonable. But there are not 50 pax a day bypassing TSA and entering the sterile area (the initial proposition) and getting on planes.

YadiMolina

2 million passengers a day are on one side of a boundary with hundreds of passages monitored by humans and want to be on the other side. Mistakes are going to happen in any number of processes. The Terminal is going to get dumped only when the humans monitoring the boundary suspect that the boundary has been breached. We know though various reports that TSA fails to capture __ % of weapons during tests, which shows that their processes are not perfect. I'm thinking about perfectly innocent ticketed passengers somehow missing screening undetected and continuing on their journey with no issues. None of us know what that number is, but I'm certain it's not zero.

WillCAD

If someone illicitly gains entrance to the sterile area without screening and is not caught, there is no terminal dump.

A terminal dump only occurs when someone illicitly gains entrance to the sterile area without being screened, and gets caught.

They only get caught infrequently, which is why terminal dumps don't happen every week.

So yes, I can certainly see where the number of people who illicitly gain access to the sterile area without screening and don't get caught might be in the tens per week. I can't really see it being in the tens per day, but given that millions of people enter hundreds of US airports on a daily basis, anywhere from twenty to fifty a week nationwide somehow finding their way into sterile areas without being caught doesn't seem impossible to me.

Section 107

Impossible, of course not. But possibility and probably are entirely different things. Completely agree, terminal dumps only happen when they know a pax didn't get screened. I am limiting the discussion to pax because there are hundreds (and thousands at CAT X airports) of folks that have authorization to be in the SIDA/sterile areas without being screened.

So, how could a passenger get access to the sterile area without being screened?

There are only a few ways to enter the sterile area not from the AOA:
- through the PSC (which is by definition not bypassing TSA irregardless [sic] of how well the pax was actually screened);
- through the arriving pax/terminal exit which is guarded and monitored by a TSO and frequently also by a police officer to prevent exactly such an occurrence;
- through a secured door requiring a badge into a "back office" area of the SIDA and then finding one's way into the terminal (sterile) area. [At any TSA controlled/ASP airport, there are no doors without a badge reader that has access to the SIDA/sterile area].

There are extremely few, if any, pax (especially with luggage) successfully getting into the terminal by walking the wrong way through the terminal exit undetected by the guard and or LEO. I am 100% certain there are definitely not even remotely close to 50 pax a day doing it.

There are an equally extremely small number of pax (especially with luggage), without a SIDA badge, getting through secured doors and then making their way through the back office/maintenance areas into the terminal. Yes, piggybacking occurs, but by airport workers, not by pax who would stand out like a sore thumb and really have no way to know where they are going - there is generally no signage back there indicating which way to the gates.

It simply isn't happening. Not by pax.

WillCAD

I can't and won't spell it out publicly, but there are ways, and it's certainly possible for someone who is familiar with an airport to get into the sterile area - which is not the same as the SIDA - without being screened. I mean, airport security isn't some leaky sieve, but it's also not an impermeable membrane.

Also, I agree with you that there's no way fifty people per day get into the sterile area without being screened. But I could believe that tens of people per week (say, 20-50 on average) do it nationwide. Maybe some weeks there are five and other weeks there are fifty. There are something like 150 international airports in the US, and I would hazard a wild guess that there is at least an equal number of regional airports, so at least 300. With two million emplanements per day, that means that tens of millions of people - passengers, visitors, and employees - go in and out of airport terminals on a daily basis. With that many human bodies flooding a couple of hundred facilities, stuff is bound to happen, mistakes are bound to be made.

TSA finds five to six thousand firearms at the checkpoint each year, and we know from Red Team tests that their failure rate is abysmal, somewhere between 75 and 90 percent. If you use a 75% failure rate, that means that 15-18k firearms make it onto planes yearly, or an average of 300-350 per week. Is it so hard to believe that 20-50 people per week also get past the ever-vigilant thin blue final line of defense against snow globes and water bottles without getting caught?