An incident occurred at New Chitose Airport in the Japanese prefecture of Hokkaido that led to mass flight cancellations and delays. The cause of the large-scale disruptions was the disappearance of ordinary scissors from a shop located in the departure area. This was reported by pravilamag.ru with reference to the BBC.
Due to concerns that the disappearance of the dangerous item could be connected with the preparation of a terrorist act, the airport management decided to suspend all security checks on domestic flights. This led to 36 flights being cancelled and another 201 being delayed. Passengers faced long waits and repeated inspections, which caused chaos and huge queues in the terminal.
Despite the fact that the scissors were found the next day in the same shop where they were initially considered missing, air traffic was restored on the day of the incident, before the item was found.
Airport officials explained their actions as necessary to ensure passenger safety and emphasized that such incidents were caused by deficiencies in storage and management systems at warehouses. The Japanese ministry has demanded that the airport management conduct a thorough investigation into the incident and take measures to prevent similar situations in the future.
New Chitose Airport is one of the busiest in Japan and serves one of the most popular domestic air routes in the world, between Tokyo and Sapporo. According to aviation analytics company OAG, the airport served more than 15 million passengers in 2022.
