A registered sex offender from Utah has been arrested after he attempted to board a plane at Sal Lake City International Airport using a stolen boarding pass that he snatched from a woman.
Michael Salata, aged 61, snatched the boarding pass from a Southwest Airlines kiosk on November 5 after the female passenger printed it off but accidentally left it behind.
Somehow Salata then managed to clear security with the pass.
The woman managed to get a replacement pass uploaded to her phone, and was just a few passengers behind Salata in the line to board the flight to Oakland, California.
Check-in staff stopped Salata and questioned the name on his pass.
The flight was leaving around 9 p.m., which is far from peak time for the airport.
‘He tried to make it seem like it was a mistake, that the boarding pass printed incorrectly or that he grabbed the wrong boarding pass, (something) to that effect,’ Salt Lake Airport Police Chief Craig Vargo told the Deseret News.
He had no items on him that would have flagged security, Vargo said.
‘It wasn’t like he was able to get anything past the screening checkpoint that would have been a risk to anybody else,’ he said.
Transportation Security Authority spokeswoman authority Lori Dankers told the newspaper the incident was under investigation, but would not say if any disciplinary action was being taken against the TSA officer that cleared Salata through security.
Read More: Man steals woman’s boarding pass, checks into flight at Salt Lake airport
