A Woman's Makeup Bag Cancelled 300 Flights and Caused Scenes at a German Airport

The equilibrium of your average airport is very easy to disrupt. One woman in Germany managed to help unleash a tidal wave of hell throughout Munich Airport earlier this week that canceled over 300 flights, all because of her makeup bag and a chatty security guard.

It's a story of how one oversight can wreak untold havoc in an airport, so here it goes: the unidentified woman originally tried to board a flight with a carry-on bag that contained liquids that were too big to take on the plane. But instead of throwing the liquids out, she opted to check her bag. On her way back to security, though, she improbably managed to skirt through the checkpoint unseen -- an enviable skill coveted by basically everybody on Earth.  

But the woman's ghostly drift through security had terrible implications for about 32,000 people at the airport, according to One Mile at a Time. Reports in Germany suggest security personnel in charge of the checkpoint were busy in a conversation when the woman got through. Shortly afterward, with the woman already on her flight and security agents confused at her absence, the airport's Terminal 2 went into panic mode: All flights departing the airport were grounded while the terminal was completely evacuated.  

The snafu made for some very unappealing scenes: 

The guard's brief attention lapse had some pretty devastating consequences: according to Deutsche Welle, "about 330 flights were cancelled and more than 32,000 passengers were left stranded from Saturday morning until Sunday afternoon after a woman entered the secure area of the airport without going through security."

Flights were reportedly grounded for 7 hours on the Saturday the woman boarded her flight without an additional screening. That night, 700 passengers had to sleep in the airport on cots provided by authorities.

In total, the makeup bag saga will reportedly cost Munich Airport around $1.2 million, which seems about right, even it was all sparked by some cosmetics.

h/t Travel + Leisure