All those machines and check points and the pat downs and profiling that now go with the doubtful pleasure of flying added up to diddley squat when Louisiana man Tom Wagner wound himself locked inside the ExpressJet plane that had been towed to the hangar after landing.

Wo. Imagine if this happened to you. There you are enjoying your flight, chatting up the air hostesses and getting nowhere and then you get a little sleepy and you fall asleep and when you wake up, guess where you are?

In a hangar. In the dark. No lights. Nothing... Hey, just a second, I was on a plane going to new York. Have I been kidnapped, are we being held at ransom?

No, I am in a seat, wearing my belt and that was a good sleep.

Unbelievable.

But get a load of this. Not one of the crew spotted a full grown man sleeping in his chair. The cleaners, the baggage handlers, all those security guys, the haul away crew, nobody even bothered.

The guy was illegally in a hangar all night and he could have made custard of this highly vaunted security. Imagine if he had been a terrorist, he’d have been laughing all the way to the target.

Why did it happen? Tell you why. All research shows there is no such thing as failsafe. Fling in murphy’s law that if things can go wrong they will and you have a deal for disaster. The human factor will always kick in and airport security is always vulnerable to three elements; shortage of staff, delayed arrivals and departures triggering errors in those whose time is up for the day and they have switched off, and habit. Don’t discount habit. It just simply is the single largest reason for messing it up.

You don’t expect the man to be sleeping in his seat so you don’t look for him and the ‘blind eye’ kicks in. You and I, we do it all the time, every day, we miss the obvious.

Which is why if someone is determined to breach security he will.

Lucky, Tom figured it out and realized he had a mobile phone on him and the bar was not on one, the phone was fully charged contrary to our experience which is if you have to make a desperate phone call, the last bar will disappear.

So he called his girlfriend and said , “I am locked in a plane.”

She thought he was crazy. And she said, “That’s nice, now come on home.”

‘No, seriously, I am in a hangar,locked in the plane.”

“Enough of this Tomfoolery, we are supposed to go out for dinner.”

“We’ll go out for dinner if you get me out of here, call ExpressJet and tell them I’m on their plane.”

Imagine how that conversation went.

“My boyfriend is locked in your aircraft in the hangar.”

“Excuse me?”

“No, you excuse me, get my boyfriend out.”

“Ma’am, if this is a joke, it is against federal laws and…’

“Will you listen, my boyfriend is locked up in the hangar, he is on this number, now call him and get him out of there.”

They did. And they gave him a hotel overnight stay and $250 for spending.