Evacuation Flub Spooks LAX

Passengers at LAX were treated to a scare last night, after flight display boards told them to evacuate in response to an emergency. Turns out the message was an accident, airport authorities say. The message appeared at 9:47pm. "After the mistake was discovered, airport staff removed the message from all the monitors by 9:54pm," a spokeswoman tells the Los Angeles Times.

At first, officials thought a hack was to blame, prompting a hurried investigation. But they ultimately realized that an airline contractor had accidentally overridden the flight display system, the spokeswoman says. The contractor was "programming airline check-in information into a set of monitors for a particular flight when he accidentally activated the pre-programmed emergency terminal evacuation message," she explains. (More Los Angeles stories.)