How To Hide Illegal Items in an Airport – Landside

Hiding something (illegal?) in a place where it shouldn’t be in the first place is a challenge to even the most experienced “undercover” operative – or criminal, for that matter. So how would you go about hiding something in an airport, for example? Well, let’s take a look at that, shall we?

A favored technique to transport items into restricted areas is to place the item(s) there before they are needed, preferably in times when the area is not restricted, or restrictions are less severe than they will be at a later time.

An airport is generally divided into two main parts, “landside”, where passengers come in from the street – the non secure area, and “airside”, where passengers, crew and other personnel have been through security checkpoints and searches, bags and items are checked and weapon restrictions are tight.

Getting into the “landside” of the airport is easy – you simply walk in from the street. Hiding something on the landside is easy – you simply hide it, and chances are that the item won’t be found or removed until you want it to be. Getting something airside is what’s tricky – in some places it might not even be possible, but we’ll deal with that later. As a rule, nothing is impossible, just very, very difficult, right? Right.

Let’s start with airport landside.

Landside of airports are patrolled by security guards, and more often than not, police. In general, you can assume that both the security guards and the police officers are armed (and dangerous). In some coutries, neither of them will have guns, but those countries are getting fewer and fewer. Anyway.

If you want to hide something in the airport’s landside, there’s nothing more to it than hiding something in your own home. Except it’s an airport.

– Trash cans will be emptied at least once every day, and that means they’re a stupid place to hide anything. Some airports now have automatic trash transportation systems that connect to every trashcan, sucking away anything that’s put in them almost immediately. So again, a silly place to stash anything that you might want to keep.

– In plain sight.

Contrary to popular belief, hiding things in plain sight isn’t all that smart, at least not in an airport. Bags, be they plastic or otherwise will be searched or destroyed or both in an airport, so that’s not a very viable alternative.

– Under things.

Now we’re talking. The few places where people stuck in a routine rarely look is under things, and when you look for people often stuck in routines, you don’t have to look further than your airport security guard. Now, for those of you who read this site often, it’s obvious that we like airport security. TSA “agents” and all, security officers and the whole package deal. That doesn’t mean that we don’t know the sides of them that are less desirable. There are a lot of repetitive tasks in airport security, and that does, in the end, take its toll on people and their effectiveness in doing their duties. While most airports carry out daily searches for things that shouldn’t be there, both landside and airside, the searches are often done by people who are stuck in the daily routine (or twice daily) of searching the areas, and that means they will miss things.

– In plain sight.
This isn’t as stupid as it sounds. In tests done on airport security personnel, the items that were most often overlooked were those that were, for example, taped to a wall, in eye’s height. A knife taped to the wall, a screwdriver or something similar, will be overlooked in a very surprising number of situations.

Making something look as if it belongs is the clue here. Aim high instead of low, and have your items either look like something that should be up on the wall, or integrate them with something that is already there – for example an emergency light, a fire alarm control panel or a poster holder, a flatscreen tv, and whatever else might be mounted on the walls. Only rarely will every nook and cranny of an area be examined, and wherever someone needs a ladder, you can be almost sure that “someone” won’t go to the trouble.

If you’re really crafty, you can always get a hold of similar trash cans to the ones that are already in place, and outfit them the way you want, then place the trash cans in the area you want it to be, for later perusal. There are always ways to get a new trashcan past security – show up in work clothes, and tell them one was broken, and you’re there to replace it. What about the old one? Well, that was taken out when it was broken, of course. These puppies are hard to come by, and so it’s taken a few days to get a replacement.

Just in case you want to try something…

…you shouldn’t. If you get caught (and you probably will) there will be trouble. So, read this for your amusement, and education.