Airport closed after suspicious bag lost
By Scott Ishikawa and Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writers
Federal transportation security officials shut down Honolulu International
Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser
Airport for at least an hour yesterday after what later appeared to be a false alarm at the interisland terminal during luggage screening.
Maui passenger Miki Entwisle of Wasilla, Alaska, reads at the Honolulu airport interisland terminal while waiting for her flight to line up for check-in. Long lines stretched into the loading zone outside the terminal because of a security scare after a bag set off an alarm and then was lost.
Airport security officials were investigating yesterday how a carry-on bag that tripped an alarm after being swabbed for explosives and weapons was picked up and disappeared before it could be searched.
Depending on what surveillance records show, the security breach could mean disciplinary action or termination for an employee, said Sidney Hayakawa, Transportation Security Administration security director in Honolulu.
"If the person was asleep, absolutely," Hayakawa said. "But if someone was busy and made a mistake, we'll correct that... we need to identify the weaknesses they had and correct the weaknesses."
Several thousand passengers were evacuated from the main and inter-island terminals at about 6:30 a.m., Hayakawa said.
Security units and search dogs combed the terminals until about 9:30 a.m., when the re-screening began, said Rod Haraga, state transportation director. Passengers were allowed back into the terminals for re-screening beginning at 7:30 a.m., but the incident already had caused a domino effect of flight delays.
The suspicious bag never turned up in the second screening, so the assumption is the test was a false positive, Hayakawa said.
Haraga said a test swab of the passenger's carry-on bag indicated traces of TNT explosives, but officials acknowledged different substances could give the same result.
Passengers on at least three flights were asked to disembark because of the security breach, airport officials said.
Carole Friesen from Alberta, Canada, said she arrived at the interisland terminal at 7 a.m. to check in and found a sea of people waiting along the roadside at the baggage check-in area.
"My flight from Canada to here had delays for numerous reasons, so this is just icing on the cake," said Friesen, who was still waiting outside the terminal at 9 a.m. for her Big Island flight.
Hawaiian Airlines spokesman Keoni Wagner said the shutdown had affected four of its interisland flights, delaying each about 20 to 30 minutes. Aloha Airlines spokesman Stu Glauberman said all its morning flights were delayed, with one Maui round-trip flight cancelled because "it was running way too late."
Hayakawa said yesterday's airport shutdown was unrelated to federal officials' decision to raise the national terrorism threat level to "orange," indicating a high risk of terrorist attacks.
It was the first time an airport in Hawai'i was shut down since federal TSA members took over baggage screening at the end of last year.
In a similar incident on Dec. 30, 2001, airport security officials shut down the Honolulu airport for about two hours because of what they thought was a suspicious bag that had gotten by airport screeners.
