Panic erupts in the McCallister household as soon as the day begins. The parents’ alarm clock never rings, bags and coats spill across the floor, and the family barrels out the door to catch a flight to Florida.
The pandemonium intensifies at the airport. There, the McCallisters must dodge fellow holiday travelers and luggage as they sprint to their gate while final boarding calls echo overhead. Amid the mayhem, 10-year-old Kevin accidentally boards the wrong plane and finds himself alone in New York City just days before Christmas.
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More than 30 years after “Home Alone” turned travel chaos into comedy, the frantic opening scenes of the movie’s 1992 sequel still hit close to home, especially as the busy year-end travel period gets underway. But would Kevin McCallister still end up “Lost in New York” in 2025?
In an age of federal airport security checkpoints and digitized air travel, the fictional character played by Macaulay Culkin almost certainly wouldn’t have gotten onto a commercial airliner by himself, said Sheldon Jacobson, who studies air travel operations and security and whose research contributed to the design of TSA PreCheck.
“In the 1990s, it was plausible,” Sheldon said. “It was close enough to plausible that people weren’t rolling their eyes at it, but this would not happen today.”
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Mix-ups in movie much less feasible
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks fundamentally changed how Americans move through airports, ushering the creation of the Transportation Security Administration, government-run security screenings, mandatory ID checks and restricted gate access. Before 9/11, travelers could head straight to their plane with little more than a paper ticket. Now, every passenger and bag is screened, names are checked against flight manifests and access beyond security checkpoints is tightly controlled.
Even the paper tickets that made Kevin’s mix-up possible are largely a thing of the past. In the film, Kevin frantically trails a man wearing a coat like his father’s to the wrong gate at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, then crashes into an airline agent, sending both his ticket and a stack of boarding passes fluttering to the floor. Kevin explains that his family is already on the plane and he doesn’t want to get left behind.
“Do you have a boarding pass?” the agent asks. Kevin gestures to the pile of paper tickets and is ultimately allowed onto the plane.