‘Logistic Gaffe’ Allows 159 Passengers to Skip Border Control at NRT
Jeff Edwards April 19, 2016
Shuttle buses reportedly dropped off international passengers arriving from Taiwan at the wrong terminal, inadvertently allowing a planeload of passengers to bypass customs in Tokyo.
Weather may have played a part in the confusion that resulted in 159 Vanilla Air passengers bypassing customs upon arrival at Tokyo Narita Airport (NRT). The plane from Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport (TPE) was briefly diverted to Chūbu Centrair International Airport (NGO) en route due to high winds on Sunday. Vanilla Air officials told Japan Today that the unscheduled stop may have led ground crews at the flight’s final NRT destination to mistakenly believe that the passengers were arriving on a domestic rather than an international flight.
Airline officials revealed the incident in a press release on Monday. The low-fare All Nippon Airways subsidiary said that the passengers themselves reported the irregularities after they were allowed to enter the country and claim luggage without passing through any customs or border control checkpoints. A spokesperson for the airline said that representatives had “managed to contact and properly process 110 of the passengers” on the flight. The company says it is working to reach the remaining 49 passengers who inadvertently bypassed entry protocols.
Vanilla Air noted that the majority of the passengers on the flight were Japanese nationals and only 10 of the passengers held foreign citizenship. While the airline dismissed the mix-up as a “logistic gaffe,” authorities are taking the matter very seriously. An NRT official told reporters that airport managers “have never heard of so many people arriving in Japan without completing immigration procedures.”
[Photo: Wikipedia]
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@Cofyknsult Gotta hand it to your active imagination and vivid racial desceiption. Typical xynophobic reaponse to something that is in any logical way of thinking, truly a mistake.
One does not need to be a terrorist to be a sympathiser or to act on instructions from someone with a vested interest in bypassing controls. It can as well be the bus driver's Moroccan supervisor wishing to facilitate his cousin's undocumented entry as something more sinister. Behind every terrorist act, there are hidden logistics by undetectable people one sees every day in the street.
Cofyknsult - Unless you're suggesting the driver was a possible undercover terrorist who could be in on it (the only reason I can think of for telling us he was Arab...), I don't think getting on a plane and hoping it's one of the 0.0000000000001% that bypass immigration controls is a particularly logical method of sneaking into a country...
This is probably because you are European, Nort American, Australian or from a "wealthy" Asian country. I find that immigration agencies all over the world are very selective in whom they check or not (with exceptions of course..). North African countries are not on their easygoing list.
My passport is only checked about 50% of the time I enter or leave the Schengen area through Spain. By "checked", I mean that someone actually verifies that I have a passport at all. The proportion of times that the passport is actually opened by somebody is a further half of that.