In December last year, on Christmas Eve, Craig Sturt, a 46 year old Brit, managed to fly from London to New York without a plane ticket or even a passport. The story has only just now come to light as the Metropolitan Police made a public appeal for finding him after he had failed to appear to his court hearing on 22 January.
Sturt was arrested back in December, charged with obtaining services by deception, being unlawfully airside and boarding an aircraft without permission and pleaded guilty in front of the Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court. However, he did not show up to court again for his sentencing on 22 January.
The man was re-arrested on 12 February, but how he managed to pull off such a stunt in the first place could expose major security breaches at Heathrow Airport as well as with British Airlines boarding procedures. In a post 9/11 aviation landscape, it should not be possible for planes to have any unaccounted passengers onboard. The story is that much more baffling considering how easy it was for Sturt to get through the airport by simply walking, no advanced devices to fool automatic gates, no fake boarding passes, he simply walked through.
“It’s staggering this could happen. It doesn’t bear thinking about what might have happened if a terrorist had successfully boarded a flight undetected. (…) Officials in the US are furious and demanding to know how this could have happened”, a source told the Sun. “This is a major embarrassment for Heathrow and Border Force, happening at our flagship airport. It’s not a great look for BA either – staff have simply been negligent and not done their jobs.”
On 23 December, the Brit simply showed up to London’s Heathrow Airport and tailgated another passenger to pass through the automatic security gates, he just walked right behind someone before the gates closed back again. This somehow escaped any security personnel on site. He then proceeded to security check where no one asked him for a boarding pass or passport. It is unclear how he got past border control, but the Sun says he also tailgated another passenger through the automatic passport scanners.
He then boarded a British Airways flight where, again, nobody asked for any proof that Sturt was actually supposed to be on that plane. To his luck, although the flight had been fully booked, several passengers had missed their connection at Heathrow, so he had a few free seats on the plane to chose from. He even helped himself to free food and drinks.
Sturt was only caught when security staff at New York’s JFK Airport asked for his documentation. He was put on the next flight back to the UK where he was arrested upon touchdown on Christmas Day.
“I don’t know how Craig has managed to dodge security at the UK’s biggest airport and fly to America without a passport and ticket”, Sturt’s brother, Lee Smith, told the Sun. Ironically, Smith said he was listening to Sting’s “English Man in New York” when he received the call that his brother had been taken into custody at JFK.
