Woman who stowed away on flight from New York to Paris is indicted
Svetlana Dali, 57, was indicted on a stowaway charge that carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
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A Russian woman who was arrested after she stowed away on a flight from New York to Paris was indicted Monday by a federal grand jury in Brooklyn.
Svetlana Dali, 57, was indicted on a stowaway charge that carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
She was arrested in early December after she was returned to the United States a week after she was found aboard a Nov. 26 Delta Air Lines flight as it headed from JFK International Airport in New York to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.
After she was returned to the United States, she was arrested again on Dec. 16 in Buffalo after authorities said she tried to enter Canada after cutting off a GPS monitoring device that was put on in New York when she was freed on bail. Since the second arrest, she has been held at the federal Brooklyn Detention Center.
Her court-appointed lawyer declined to comment on Monday.
The arrest of Dali was one of several recent breaches of security at airports nationwide. In the past month on separate occasions, people who hid in the wheel wells of planes have been found dead. And Dali was one of two stowaways who were arrested on different flights in November and December. In addition, a passenger last week opened an emergency door as a plane taxied in Boston.
Experts have said that a shortage of air traffic controllers, outdated plane-tracking technology and other problems are eroding the margin of safety in air travel. But some experts also note that over 3 million people fly safely to their destinations each day and the last deadly commercial plane crash in the United States occurred in 2009.
