One day last month, an Asiana Airlines flight sat on the tarmac at Incheon airport in Seoul, South Korea, waiting to push back from the gate for a routine flight across the Yellow Sea to China. The passengers had boarded; everything seemed normal.
But then several minutes passed, and nothing happened. The airplane door remained open. Finally, the voice of a flight attendant crackled over the intercom, “Could [passenger X] please come to the front of the plane?”