Three flights delayed at Gulfport airport when fork found in bag

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Posted 2:10PM on Monday, January 28, 2002

GULFPORT, Miss. - Three flights were delayed Sunday at the Gulfport-Biloxi International Airport when a long-pronged metal fork was found in a shopping bag. Ken Spirito, the assistant airport director, said two people traveling together with identical shopping bags went past the checkpoint at the same time, simultaneously placing the bags on the conveyor belt to be screened. He said the screener saw the fork in one of the bags, but mistakenly stopped the person with the bag that did not contain the fork. "By the time the screener checked the bag and found that it did not contain the fork, the other person had already boarded the plane," Spirito said. "So we had to pull about 100 people out of the concourse while we searched for the bag with the fork." Spirito said a fork is prohibited by the Federal Aviation Administration "If the people had been carrying two different types of bags, it never would have happened," he said. Three flights were delayed about an hour, including ASA and AirTran flights to Atlanta and a Patriot charter flight to Houston. Metal forks and other sharp objects considered harmless before Sept. 11 are prohibited in carry-on luggage and packages on commercial flights. Spirito said although airport security personnel confiscate prohibited items every day, Sunday's incident was the first that caused a flight delay since Dec. 31. That delay occurred when a National Guard member went to get a superior officer after finding a bag that contained a suspicious item and lost track of the bag.