Man Walks Past Security Screening Staring At iPad, Causing Airport Evacuation

First time accepted submitter chentiangemalc writes While Australia is on "high alert" for terror threats a man walked past a Sydney Airport security screening while engrossed in his iPad and delayed flights for an hour. From the article: "This event was captured on CCTV and unnerved officials so much that they evacuated passengers. As the Sydney Morning Herald reported, the man found himself (or, perhaps, didn't) going into the terminal through an exit passage that clearly was convenient for him, but less convenient for the hordes of passengers who not only had to be removed from Terminal 3, but also re-screened. A spokeswoman for Qantas told the Morning Herald: 'The man disembarked a flight and left. It appears he wasn't paying attention, was looking at his iPad, forgot something and walked back past (the security area).'"

Comments

Re:No he didn't

[mjwx]

" a man walked past a Sydney Airport security screening while engrossed in his iPad and delayed flights for an hour."

TFA implies he caused the delay, when in fact incompetent airport security staff caused the delay.

He did cause the delay.

What this moron did was leave the secure area (he was disembarking) and then walk back through. Its not like the secure area exit isn't extremely, mind-blowingly obvious. The AFP (Australian Federal Police) didn't know if this guy was a complete tool or a malicious agent, but they cant take chances. Fortunately it turned out he was a complete idiot but this all could have been avoided if he had of been doing something as silly as paying attention to what he was doing. I mean what kind of imbecile tries to walk back through a security gate?

Security in Australia isn't as bad as the USA (yet), in fact it's quite efficient in comparison but if you ignore them they will come down on you like a ton of bricks.

Re:No he didn't

[jelizondo]

Sorry to burst your buble. Right next door, in Mexico, with a much more relaxed airport security, never had an airplane hijacked... Until 2009, years after the FAA imposed flight restrictions went into effect(1).

On the other hand, in mainland China, there was an attempted hijack in 2012!

If airport security was a solution to plane hijacking, why would a country without any security (Mexico) not suffer from it and a paranoid state (China) recently had to deal with it?

If you recall, in the past (60's-80's) U.S. planes were hijacked to Havana; in the 90's the trend was reversed: Cuban planes were hijacked and taken to the U.S. Which brings the question again, if the totalitarian Cuban police was unable to stop the hijackings, why should it work in the U.S.?

Now see the perverse incentives: a flight taken to Havana was heralded as taken by "people's heros" and gave a lot of cred in certain circles; turn the coin and see the other face: hijacking a Cuban plane and taking it into the U.S. will NOT land you in jail; it will grant you political asylum!

(1) FAA rules apply to all flights landing on the U.S. even if they originated elsewhere. There used to be smoking flights to/from the U.S. (Air France, Mexicana, TACA, etc.) until the FAA ruled that any flights originating or landing in the U.S. had to be non-smoking, regardless of the carrier's flag. The same was applied to security: no flight bound to the U.S. is allowed to land if there are not TSA-like security measures in the originating country . So, in effect, the FAA and TSA determine what security measures are taken on airports as distant as Buenos Aires.