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.
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,