So I FINALLY arrived at DFW last night for a connection (3 hours late, including the obligatory diversion to OKC, so we'd been on the plane for more than 6 hours on what should have been a 3 hour flight), and after waiting at the gate for 5-10 minutes the gate agent walks on board and announces:

"I'm the agent from up top, and I wanted to let you know that you will be able to leave the plane, but there has been a security breach and no one is allowed to leave Terminal C. We are locked down. Hopefully it won't be too much longer. For those of you with connections in other terminals, you will have to wait in Terminal C until the TSA clears the alert. Skylink is not running."

I thought the folks in the row behind me were going to riot. They had a tight connection to LAS out of Terminal A, with 20 minutes until it left.

We got off the plane, and there were people everywhere. There was a line of probably 500 people at the terminal exit. The concourse was packed not only with the folks arriving, but those delayed leaving, the folks caught in the lockdown, and those who were on cots because their flights were canceled.

I saw two cops with dogs walk by. That was it. About 20 minutes later, they opened the doors and gates.

While it's better than a terminal dump, with the 10s of thousands of people in that terminal at that hour, I think it would be absolutely impossible to find a person or object that "breached security". IMHO, all this did was raise costs to the airline and inconvenience travelers already very frustrated.

We truly in danger of becoming a third-world country in terms of air-travel.