More than 360 air travelers arriving in Chicago early Friday morning on an overnight flight from Los Angeles were detained in a search for a weapon.
No weapon was found, but the search turned up 51 pounds of marijuana.
Arriving shortly after 5:30 a.m. on United Airlines Flights 114 and 126, the passengers were put through a lengthy “reverse screening” because of a security lapse at Los Angeles International Airport on Thursday night.
They were delayed at O’Hare International Airport while their bags were re-examined by an X-ray machine or searched by security personnel, O’Hare and United Airlines representatives said.
The process was completed about 7 a.m., said Monique Bond, O’Hare spokeswoman.
The action was taken after a screener at the Los Angeles airport discovered, shortly before midnight Thursday, a videotaped X-ray image of what appeared to be a weapon. United and Federal Aviation Administration officials would not say what type of weapon.
The inspector had been reviewing a videotape of checkpoint screenings by the previous shift.
The image was recorded at the security checkpoint through which the passengers on the two Chicago flights had passed with their carry-on bags. The post was manned by employees of Argenbright Security Inc., which has a record of screening and administrative lapses.
Officials believed the image was from a bag carried by one of the 369 travelers headed for Chicago on the 11:45 p.m. and 11:49 p.m. flights. The terminal, which closed at midnight, had no other passengers waiting to depart.
“Not knowing how the image was resolved, the decision was made to err on the side of safety and have those flights reverse-screened,” said Jerry Snyder, a spokesman for the FAA in Los Angeles.
The search netted one passenger who wascarrying slightly more than 50 pounds of marijuana wrapped in two cellophane packages, said O’Hare police unit Cmdr. Steven Peterson.
Candrena McKenzie, 21, of Chicago, was charged with a state offense: delivery of cannabis with an estimated value of $110,700.
She was being held Friday evening at the District 25 lockup, with a court date scheduled for March 18, said Sgt. Robert Cargie, a police spokesman.
But no weapons were found during the re-screening, police said.
Officials speculated that the image was the product of a testing procedure to keep screeners alert. Threat Image Projection is used to randomly project the images of a variety of fictitious weapons or “threat objects” into the X-ray image of a carry-on bag that contains no such weapon.
TIP images are meant to be resolved by security screeners and their supervisors at the time they are projected. A notification appears on the X-ray screen, after a threat image has been used. But the notification does not appear on the videotape, according to those familiar with the process.
“Whether it was a TIP image or not will be determined,” Snyder said. “There will be an inquiry into the way the previous shift handled the image.”
In another reverse-screening incident, 30 passengers on Southwest Airlines Flight 1867 arriving at Midway Airport from Baltimore on Thursday afternoon were put through the process.
The reason was a false alarm at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. A luggage-screening explosives-detection device malfunctioned there, leading to evacuation of a terminal.
