Airports, Americas, Asia, In the News, Weekly

This week: Radioactive material unclaimed at Indian airport & more

Did you know that we go through airport related news at least once a day? Those news articles that we find worthy to share then get tweeted out to the world. And when we do these weekly news round-ups, it’s a fairly straight forward affair as we only have to go back to your own Twitter account and select the most interesting/most important stories of that week to be summarize here. Long story short, this week, we only tweeted 3 stories. So what?, you may ask. Well, this means that we were either slacking (nope, not our style!) or there just wasn’t much interesting going on in the world of airports this week. And the latter is exactly what happened.

So whilst we could have tweeted about a new breast feeding station at a U.S. Airport, Edinburgh airport’s success of attracting 1 Million passengers or Lady Gaga’s flamboyant arrival at Heathrow this week – we chose not to. Why? Well, frankly we didn’t see those stories being of global importance. Grey area with Lady Gaga maybe, but then we recently had plenty gossip weeks already. We’re not the Daily Mirror after all.

So, what are those world moving stories you found this week, you may want to know at this stage. Here they are:

The Times of India reported this week that an unidentified radioactive material has been lying unattended in a corner of Chennai airport’s (MAA) cargo hold for more than five years. While clearing unclaimed cargo, airport officials stumbled upon two boxes marked ‘radioactive material’. According to the article experts from the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) inspected the consignments and found one to be radioactive and the other inert. We – like you – wonder who leaves radioactive material behind? Ooops, sorry, forgot it – happens. Err, weird! The article then claims that the Airports Authority of India (AAI) is taking steps to re-export the material, which arrived from the US in 2008. Return to sender then, huh?

Earlier in the week there was a bit of an urgent ‘hey this isn’t cool’ message coming from Malaysia when one of the country’s newspaper, The Star, reported that flights in and out of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KUL) have been besieged by delays, while traffic leading out of the airport to Kuala Lumpur has come to a standstill. AirAsia later posted on its Facebook page that numerous flights due to land at the Low-Cost Carrier Terminal (LCCT) in Sepang had been diverted to the Subang International Airport, Penang International Airport (SZB) and Senai international airport (JHB), “due to unexpected change in weather at the LCC Terminal, resulting in severe air traffic congestion and flight diversions.”

And then we heard just this morning from NY Daily News that seven baggage handlers at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport (JFK) were arrested for ‘swiping’ iPads, Cartier watch and other valuables. According to the article the arrests come after El Al airlines received numerous complaints from customers that jewelry, iPads, iPhones, Canon Power Shot cameras, a Cartier watch, a $5,000 Seiko watch, and a Sony Playstation, had been removed from their luggage.

Well, see, we did fill our publishing space nevertheless. Haha. We hope you liked this slightly unconventional format this week – safe travels!

[Picture from Wikipedia – some rights reserved]