A pair of misplaced scissors sent a Japanese airport into a major security lockdown on Saturday, leading to dozens of flight cancellations and delays as passengers were evacuated from the terminal and rescreened by security officers.
The bizarre security incident occurred on August 17 at New Chitose Airport in Hokkaido, Japan’s fifth-largest airport, which serves more than 24 million passengers per year.
According to local media reports, the security alert was triggered at around 10 am on Saturday when a worker in one of the airport’s stores located in the secure ‘airside’ area realized that a pair of scissors had gone astray.
Despite searching high and low for the scissors, they couldn’t be found, so the worker reported the missing scissors to airport security, who put the departures area into lockdown while a massive search operation was mounted.
Security screening at the airport was completely halted as passengers were evacuated from the airside departures area and then made to line up to be rescreened at the security checkpoints – perhaps in the hope of finding the missing scissors.
With passengers unable to board their flights, airlines were forced to cancel or delay their flights until the lockdown was lifted. In the end, 35 flights had to be axed, while 190 flights were delayed due to the security alert.
The security officers can’t be faulted for making extensive efforts to locate the scissors, but in the end, the unsuccessful search was called off, and the airport decided to resume operations two hours after the lockdown was put in place.
Matt’s take
This is probably one of the strangest reasons that we’ve seen operations halted at what is a major international airport. The lockdown would have disrupted travel plans for tens of thousands of passengers, and even after all of that effort and inconvenience, the scissors were never even located.
Unfortunately, these kinds of incidents where thousands of passengers have to be rescreened do occur from time to time, although generally, it’s because it has been discovered that passengers have managed to bypass normal security checks – whether deliberately or, in some cases, accidentally.
In 2022, Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport in Australia was sent into chaos after a passenger who had arrived on a connecting flight accidentally wandered into the baggage reclaim hall before doubling back into the secure airside area to make his next flight.
Security officers didn’t realize that the man had reentered the secure area until it was too late and when they went searching for him, he was nowhere to be found. As a result, the entire airport terminal, along with several flights that the man could have been a passenger on were evacuated and all the passengers rescreened.
you have to understand Japan. This makes total sense to them…….to us not so much