A Canadian man accused of posing as a pilot and an airline employee to get free flights pleaded not guilty after being extradited to the United States, federal authorities said.
Dallas Pokornik, 33, of Toronto, was arrested in Panama after being indicted on wire fraud charges in federal court in Hawaii last October, federal authorities said. He pleaded not guilty Tuesday following his extradition to the United States, and a federal public defender for Pokornik declined to discuss the case.
Federal authorities said Pokornik fooled three U.S. carriers into giving him hundreds of free tickets over a span of four years. Court documents described how, after working as a flight attendant for a Toronto-based airline from 2017 to 2019, Pokornik used fraudulent employee identification from that carrier to obtain tickets reserved for pilots and flight attendants on three other airlines.
The indictment did not identify the airlines involved, but said the U.S. carriers are based in Honolulu, Chicago and Fort Worth, Texas. A spokesperson for Hawaiian Airlines said the company does not comment on litigation. Representatives for United Airlines and American Airlines did not immediately respond to emails from The Associated Press.
Porter Airlines, a Canadian carrier based in Toronto, said it was unable to verify any information related to the story. Air Canada said it had no record of Pokornik working there. The AP later corrected the report to note that Air Canada is based in Montreal, not Toronto.
Industry experts said they were surprised by the allegations, pointing to the cross-checking airlines can use to verify whether a person seeking to fly on another carrier is an employee. John Cox, a retired pilot who runs an aviation safety firm in St. Petersburg, Florida, said the allegations were “surprising” and said the only thing he could think of was that the person did not show up as no longer employed by the airline, so that when checks were made at the gate he “showed up as a valid employee.”
In an explanation of how screening usually works, another aviation pilot, Bruce Rodger, described how crew members traveling for work use a “known crew member” card linked to a database with their photo. Rodger said they also present an employee badge and government-issued identification, and said using the known crew member process for leisure travel isn’t allowed.
Rodger said that for leisure travel, crew members can purchase discounted standby tickets or request a jump seat, and that a standby ticket can be used while also requesting a jump seat that allows an employee to fly for free. Federal rules prohibit cockpit jump seats from being used for leisure travel, and Rodger said the plane’s captain must approve who rides in the cockpit jump seats, with official reasons including roles such as a Defense Department evaluator or an air traffic controller observing.
Prosecutors also described specific conduct attributed to Pokornik. The U.S. prosecutors said Tuesday that Pokornik requested to sit in the cockpit’s jump seat, which is typically reserved for off-duty pilots. It was not clear from court documents whether he ever actually rode in a plane’s cockpit, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Honolulu declined to say.
The case is being compared to earlier high-profile fraud stories that prompted tighter screening for flight benefits and access to aircraft. The report said the airline industry tightened standards after Frank Abagnale’s case, later popularized by the memoir “Catch Me If You Can,” and added that further restrictions on cockpit access and who can board were imposed by airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The AP transportation writer Josh Funk contributed to this report from Omaha, Nebraska.