An investigation is underway into how a woman boarded an American Airlines flight at Nashville International Airport and flew to Los Angeles without showing a ticket last week, officials said Friday.
Law enforcement met with Flight 1393 upon its arrival at Los Angeles International Airport on February 7, American Airlines said in a statement. The Federal Bureau of Investigation detained a woman for questioning after the flight landed, Laura Eimiller, a spokeswoman in Los Angeles, said Friday.
The airline said it was assisting law enforcement in the investigation, but not if its employees checked in properly at the gate.
The woman was not named because no charges had been filed as of early Friday. Ms. Eimiller said interviews are continuing.
Mark Howell, a regional spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, said the woman turned around the agency’s document checkpoint at the Nashville airport about 6:30 a.m. local time.
“He got in line and lined up, but he went under one of the stanchions,” he said Friday. “He didn’t go to check tickets and documents.”
After going through the document checkpoint, the woman and all her personal belongings went through a security check, he added.
The episode is the second time in four months that a traveler has boarded a flight to Los Angeles without proper credentials.
In November, a man believed to be a Russian national slipped through security at Copenhagen Airport in Denmark and flew to Los Angeles, carrying only Russian and Israeli ID cards in his bag, officials said.
The man, Sergey Vladimirovich Ochigava, told investigators he wasn’t sure if he had a plane ticket to Los Angeles and didn’t remember how he got on the plane. He also claimed he doesn’t remember how he got through security without a ticket.
Mr. Ochigawa was charged with stowaway, a felony, and pleaded guilty last month, according to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Central District of California. On Feb. 5, he was sentenced to prison and three years of supervised release, according to court documents.
The TSA, which is responsible for security and passenger screening at US airports, has had blunders in the past, including in 2022 when a Frontier Airlines flight from Cincinnati to Tampa was diverted to Atlanta after a passenger was spotted with a box cutter . The TSA later said errors in screening procedures were to blame for this incident.
