Originally Posted by
MzGuilty
Christep, travelling on the wrong plane COULD be a security issue. I work for an airline with half a dozen flights a day from JFK to LHR. It certainly happens that the passenger has boarded the wrong LHR flight, but the baggage has been tagged and gone onto the correct flight. OK, I only found this twice in the year I flew that route, but let's face it, once is too often and could cause a security problem.
Nope - if the bag has been screened this isn't a security problem. If the bag is safe then the bag is safe and it doesn't matter whether the person who checked it in is on the flight. If the bag isn't safe then it doesn't make any difference either given that terrorists are quite happy to die for the cause these days.
The rule about passengers not voluntarily travelling on a different plane from their bags is a legacy from the days when "security" planning was based on an assumption that terrorists wouldn't want to die with their bomb. This has been shown to be a completely invalid assumption. The rule could therefore be abandoned with no security impact.
There would of course be potentially unhappy punters (a revenue protection issue) if their bags ended up flying when they had changed their mind, but that isn't a security issue.