Several news outlets in Japan including Asahi reported that a Peach aircraft arriving at Osaka Kansai from Taipei on Monday, February 5, 2018, night was mistakenly parked at a domestic spot instead of an international one.
As a result of that, the 165 passengers of flight MM28 were directed to the domestic arrivals and entered the country without going through immigration and customs. Reportedly, the aircraft was assigned a domestic parking spot because after its flight from Taipei it was scheduled to fly on a domestic route.
The mistake was discovered when a security guard noticed that there were “many non-Japanese people” in the terminal and reported it to the relevant organizations. The passengers of the flight were then called back to clear the formalities.
However, by that time, 13 out of the 165 passengers on the flight had already left the airport. Of those, the authorities could get in touch with 12, and as of yesterday, they were still trying to contact one last passenger to arrange the formalities.
At first, I was wondering how an incident like this could happen, the fact that flights at the low-cost terminal at Kansai airport don’t use buses to board (the passengers walk to the aircraft instead) helps explain the situation.
While a bus would have been unlikely to drive the passengers to the terminal, it seems more likely that a ground staff “waving people in the right direction” would mistakenly instruct the passengers to go to the domestic arrivals – if, for no other reason, then out of habit.