Paying extra fees and taking extra steps to travel with a pet can be an annoyance, so one traveler decided to smuggle her fog on board a plane in her bag. However it didn't go so well.
According to the Daily Mail, a female passenger on a London-bound British Airways flight managed to sneak her little Yorkshire Terrier past security at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport in Israel and she was able to board the plane with the animal.
The Airbus A321 was taxiing on the runway when a passenger realized that the animal was on board after they heard squeaking coming from under a seat. They notified the crew and the plane turned back to the terminal.
The British Airways staff spoke to the woman with the dog and then decided to remove her, the dog and her luggage from the flight due to the security breach.
The woman was sitting in a window seat on the flight with her dog under the chair. A passenger near her notified the crew.
"People are concerned about the security implications. How on earth did she manage to get a dog through security at Ben Gurion?" a passenger asked, according to the Daily Mail.
Flight 166 to Heathrow was already delayed from its original take-off time of 7:00 p.m. It was on time for its rescheduled flight time of 8:40 p.m. until the dog incident.
The captain announced to the plane that a woman had been removed from the plane after the dog was discovered in her bag.
It isn't rare to see a dog on board a flight, but they are prohibited to fly in the cabin of British Airways flights, which is why the passenger was alarmed.
A British Airways spokesman told the Daily Mail that the passenger would have passed through all the relevant security and immigration points at Tel Aviv,
"We did not allow a female customer to travel on board our service from Tel Aviv to Heathrow today after it was discovered, shortly after boarding, that she was carrying a small dog in her handbag," the spokesman said. "We apologise to our customers who experienced a delay to the departure of their flight as a result of this incident."
