A Russian man who was found guilty of sneaking onto a Denmark to Los Angeles flight in November without a ticket or passport was neither the first nor the last to attempt such a scheme, a former federal security director at LAX told The Post.
Sergey Vladimirovich Ochigava, 46, was convicted last week of following another flyer through security at Copenhagen Airport, staying overnight at a terminal and sneaking onto the plane.
The suspect, who told authorities he worked as an economist, was quickly taken into custody when the plane landed in LA after officials found he did not have a passport and wasn’t listed on the passenger manifest.
He told the feds he didn’t remember how he had breached multiple levels of security and checks and balances before flying 9,000 miles across international borders.
Keith Jeffries, who served as a US Department of Homeland Security director from 2016 to 2022 and currently serves as the Vice President of K2 Security Screening Group, speculated Ochigava took his time and waited for just the right moments before making his brazen moves.
“What happens is, many people will just kind of watch and observe and see what happens, blend in with the crowd, depending on how busy it is, the security checkpoint, they’re able to navigate their way past the ticket document checker,” said Jeffries.
“The good news is that they’re screened. The aviation process is layered and if one layer fails, such as they navigate past the ticket document checker, they’re going to get screened at the checkpoint to make sure that they don’t have any prohibited items.”
Once getting through security, Ochigava clearly bode his time before sneaking onto Scandinavian Airlines Flight 931 undetected, which led the former TSA honcho to compare him to an infamous American woman who had boarded planes without credentials dozens of times over the past several decades.
“Then the next step is, if they don’t have a boarding pass, like Mr. Ochigava, and Marilyn Hartman back in the day, they’ll go to a particular gate and watch and observe, and based on the boarding process, if they can slip past the ticket agent who is checking passes while they board, they can get onto an aircraft.”
Once aboard the flight, which wasn’t completely full, Ochigava switched between unoccupied seats multiple times and chatted up passengers and the crew, whom he finessed into giving him double meal portions, prosecutors noted.
He even tried to snack on a cabin crew member’s chocolate bar, according to court documents.
His charismatic restlessness might have been a further tactic to charm flight attendants and avoid being exposed by their pre-takeoff head count, Jeffries said.
“Let’s say that layer fails, which it seems to have done so in this case, while that plane is in the air, the Customs and Border protection service, they’ve got a flight manifesto. They know who is in the air coming to the United States and they’ve got to come through customs.
“And at that point, obviously that layer caught this guy.”
Ochigava, who is facing five years in federal prison, was found to be carrying what “appeared to be Russian identification cards and an Israeli identification card,” although officials said he is not Israeli.
The man falsely claimed to have left his US passport on the plane and showed agents a photo of part of a passport that displayed his name, date of birth and identification number, but did not…
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