We had a bizarre airport experience just now in Kalispell, Montana. An experience that makes you wonder about the people running security at our airports. Here’s the story.
We met the mother of one of Andrew’s housemates, and the four of us had a nice dinner on Friday. She was slight and shy-seeming, with a soft voice and a gentle laugh. Charming and obviously smart. The 180 degree opposite of intimidating.
When we dropped Andrew off at his house today before heading to the airport, the mother was there dropping her son off also. We made small talk, which eventually lead to travel plans. She lives in Hong Kong, and was planning to hold an expat Halloween party in October. She’d been charged with/volunteered to pick up a large amount of Halloween costumes and decorations (those things apparently not being available in Hong Kong). To accomplish this she’d brought along or purchased five additional bags, which she was going to check on her plane.
As she was flying out of Kalispell on the same flight as we were, we offered to help her with all this luggage, but she said that her son could do it; she was going to drive the two of them to the airport, check the bags, then take her son back to the house before returning to the airport.
We got to the airport at about 3:30, well ahead of our 5:20 flight. (We’d just run out of stuff to do in Kalispell, and I had work to do.) We checked in, passed security, and went to our gate. After a while, we heard repeated pages for our acquaintance, but didn’t think much of it. But then we noticed security folks walking around the airport, along with the airport ground crews, and then noticed that it didn’t seem like very many people had gathered at the gate to take the plane.
Eventually the plan we would be taking arrived at the gate from it’s destination, but although its door opened up, no passengers got out; the jetway wasn’t hooked up to the door of the plane.
Suspicious, Suzie started up a conversation with the ground crew, telling them that we knew the person who they’d been paging. This interested them; they said they needed to get in touch with her and hadn’t been able to. She hadn’t answered any of the pages and they couldn’t contact her. They then told us that the whole airport was under a security lockdown — no one could come into the airport, no one could get off of the plane that had just arrived, no one could pass from the unsecured into the secured area. Apparently all this happened because (1) our friend lived in Hong Kong, (2) our friend had checked five bags filled with Halloween paraphernalia, (3) our friend left the airport to take her son home, and (4) our friend had not responded to the pages (which, of course, was impossible now because the airport was under lockdown and she couldn’t get in if she wanted to). None of these four things is illegal, none is suspicious; if there was some concern about the bags, all they had to do was to open then up and check them.
The lockdown continued for the better part of an hour. The incoming passengers on our plane had to continue to sit in their hard, small seats. Everyone on our outbound flight with short connections in Salt Lake City were screwed. Airport workers whose shifts were over couldn’t leave, and those with shifts starting couldn’t get in. People were milling around aimlessly in the parking lot. Because, as far as we could tell, of five bags filled with Halloween stuff.
This is what happens when you give small-minded, by-the-book security goons too much authority. We scoured our brains trying to figure out what could have justified locking down the entire airport. We never figured it out.
Worse, when our plane finally left, our friend wasn’t on it.
We’re not sure what happened to her. We wondered if she’d been detained. If so, I feel much, much safer now, knowing that the fine minds at the TSA are there to make the bold, tough decisions like shutting down that international terrorism magnet known as the Glacier International Airport and to save us from the horrors of Halloween luggage.
Categories: Travel -- General