A woman with a history of audacious airport breaches has reportedly done it again. Svetlana Dali, a U.S. resident originally from Russia, is accused of sneaking onto a flight from Newark Liberty International Airport to Milan without a valid ticket, baffling authorities and raising serious security questions.
The incident unfolded on Wednesday, with Dali allegedly navigating past security checkpoints and boarding the United Airlines flight undetected. Law enforcement officials state she bypassed the ticket agent and remained unnoticed by the flight crew until the aircraft was already soaring through the sky.
This isn’t Dali’s first encounter with the law regarding unauthorized travel. In November 2024, she was convicted in Brooklyn federal court for a similar stunt – stowing away on a Delta flight from New York to Paris.
That previous escapade involved Dali walking onto the Delta plane at JFK Airport without a boarding pass, ultimately being discovered hiding in the aircraft’s bathroom. Her defense? A claim that the military had poisoned her and she needed urgent medical attention, a claim a jury ultimately rejected.
The initial sentence for the Paris flight stowaway was time served, along with a year of supervised release and a $100 fee. However, Dali appealed the conviction, and the case remains pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Her pattern of behavior extends beyond these two high-profile incidents. In February 2024, she was allegedly found concealed within a bathroom in a secure international arrivals area at Miami International Airport, falsely claiming to have arrived on an Air France flight.
Records revealed no evidence of her ever being on that flight, or of leaving the United States in the preceding five years. Just days before the JFK incident, Dali also reportedly gained access to a restricted area within the departures terminal at Bradley International Airport in Connecticut.
Currently, Dali is in custody at Malpensa Airport in Milan, having been apprehended by authorities on Thursday. The FBI is now leading an investigation, working in conjunction with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to determine how she repeatedly breached security protocols.
The brazen nature of these incidents has prompted a thorough review of security measures at Newark Liberty International Airport and raised concerns about vulnerabilities in airport security nationwide. Investigators are meticulously examining how Dali managed to evade detection, time and time again.
