Cardiff Airport security blunder
26.07.08
A woman flew to the Canary Islands from Cardiff Airport - using her husband’s passport, the South Wales Echo reports. Andrea Cole, 43, of Llanishen, Cardiff, has spoken of her shock at passing unchallenged through two sets of checks at the airport, after unwittingly taking husband Graham’s passport on a holiday with her mum. She did not realise her mistake until she had boarded her flight. But she was then still able to get past immigration checks at her destination without anyone noticing.
Mrs Cole was flying to her family villa from Cardiff on July 2 with her mother. She said: ‘At the check-in desk everything seemed fine - they checked both passports, departures was fine and the passports were checked again before getting on the plane.'
‘But on sitting down in the plane I looked at what I thought was my passport, but it wasn’t. I had inadvertently taken my husband’s instead of my own without checking first. This was not noticed at either check-in or boarding and I am neither a man nor resemble my husband’s passport photo!'
Mrs Cole said she had no idea what to do or how immigration would react when they landed at their Canary Island destination. She told the newspaper: ‘To our amazement the passport was checked at entry then given straight back to me. The man physically took the passport off me, opened it, looked at me and handed it back. That’s three times security had failed and we were granted entry to Fuerteventura.’
'This is supposed to be a time of heightened security. You can’t take a bottle of water on the plane, but they let someone on with the wrong passport.’
A spokeswoman for Cardiff Airport said Servisair, the company blamed for another mix-up involving the Coray family sent to Turkey by mistake this week, would have been in charge of checking customers in and seeing them through the gate onto the plane.
She told the Echo: ‘We currently do not have details on the incident, but if it did occur the airport is again disappointed at the performance of an outside agency working on behalf of an airline. We will be investigating the issue further as soon as we have confirmation of the details from Servisair and Thomas Cook.’
A Servisair spokesman said: ‘We take security very seriously and we are investigating Mrs Cole’s statement about being apparently allowed through two passport checks on a journey abroad from Cardiff Airport. However, as this took place over three weeks ago it is proving more time consuming than usual.’
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