June 24, 2008
He checks in at Changi, clears immigration and gets on Tiger
Airways jet to Vietnam By Carolyn Quek IN HIS hurry to catch a
flight at Changi Airport's Budget Terminal yesterday morning,
retiree Ang Heng Soon, 61, grabbed the wrong passport and left
home.
He took his 39-year-old son's passport. They had left their
passports on the dining table, because the son was also flying from
Changi Airport.
The father's mistake, and how he cleared all security checks at
the airport and flew to Vietnam, led to a long day for both.
Even with the wrong passport, Mr Ang first checked in at the
Tiger Airways counter for his flight to Ho Chi Minh City, where he
was headed for a six-day holiday.
He next got past the security check by Certis Cisco officers at
the entrance to the restricted passenger area.
Then he ran into problems, failing repeatedly to scan his
fingerprint at the immigration Automated Clearance System.
Noticing his difficulty, an Immigration and Checkpoints
Authority officer directed him to a lane for manual clearance.
There, an officer cleared him to leave Singapore, and he boarded
his plane.
Mr Ang told The Straits Times he realised his mistake only
during the flight.
As soon as he arrived at the Ho Chi Minh City airport at 8.15am,
he owned up to immigration authorities there and they put him on
the same plane back to Singapore.
Around that time at Changi Airport's Terminal 1, his son
Vincent, an electronics company sales and marketing executive, also
discovered the mix-up.
He was waiting to check in for his flight to Hong Kong when he
realised that he had his father's passport.
He cancelled his flight and went to Tiger Airways' office in the
Budget Terminal, where he learnt that his father was heading
back.
Father and son were reunited at close to noon. Both made fresh
arrangements and flew off to their respective destinations later in
the day, correct passports in hand.
By then, it was too late for Mr Vincent Ang to make it to his
business meeting in Hong Kong.
Speaking to The Straits Times before catching his flight, he
said: 'The question is, how did this happen? From a security point
of view, this is pretty shocking.'
Responding to queries from The Straits Times, the Immigration
and Checkpoints Authority confirmed that Mr Ang had cleared all the
checks at the airport despite showing his son's passport.
In a statement late last night, it said that the immigration
officer who looked at his passport and did the 'face-to-face
verification' let him through because he bore a resemblance to the
photo in the passport.
'The officer should not have relied only on this but should have
checked Mr Ang's boarding pass with his passport,' a spokesman
said.
'He should also have conducted a secondary biometric check to
ascertain Mr Ang's identity. The fingerprint scans would have led
to the positive identification of Mr Ang and that he was holding
his son's passport.'
The spokesman apologised to Mr Ang for the inconvenience caused
and said: 'ICA takes a serious view of such lapses.
'We will conduct a thorough investigation into the case.
Appropriate disciplinary action will be taken against the officers
responsible for the lapses.'
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