Shortly after collecting his bag from the airport carousel my friend looked at me, paused and stooped down to look at the bag’s securing straps.

“My bag’s been opened,” he said as he made his way to a quieter corner of the arrivals hall. He opened the bag and rummaged around eventually pulling out his life jacket. At this stage I was still none the wiser, although I did wonder why he had chosen to retrieve the one object we’d been talking about only a few minutes earlier, a brand new Spinlock lifejacket and harness.

As he carefully unfolded the horseshoe style lifejacket he studied the zip at the bottom end, paused then carefully peeled the zip apart. As he did so the gas canister fell out of the jacket, detached from the trigger unit.

“They’ve disabled the gas bottle,” he said. “Interesting!”

Certainly was. Had he not seen that his bag had been tampered with, would he have looked at his lifejacket? And what if he hadn’t and on falling into the water had tried to inflate it?

Surely if someone had seen fit to disconnect a piece of safety equipment, albeit perhaps for safety reasons, you would have thought they would have notified the passenger concerned. No notification was received by my friend.

Food for thought I’d say.