Two bomb threats caused two passenger jets to receive fighter escorts recently.
The first on July 25, 2014, a flight from Toronto to Panama received an Ohio Air National Guard escort of a pair of F-16s back to Toronto's Pearson International Airport after a bomb threat by Ali Shahi, a 25-year-old Canadian citizen who threatened to "Blow up Canada" (note the beauty shot of the F-16s in the accompanying article).
Not the sharpest tool in the shed by any means, or a nice dry run attempt to see what the response would be.
Then on August 5, a Qatar Airlines flight was escorted to Manchester Airport by an RAF Typhoon after another bomb threat (Close escort pics and video at the link).
The person who committed the act is unnamed, but police in the UK don't consider him much of a real threat, as reported in The Guardian:
on a sliding scale, we think we may be looking at an idiot rather than an international terrorist” in relation to the arrested man, 47, from north west England. Nothing suspicious was found on the flight when it was searched at Manchester airport, police confirmed.
Idiocy, it appears, abounds in the friendly skies.
2 comments:
Why have a fighter escort for a BOMB THREAT? I mean, really, are you gonna have the fighter shoot the plane down because there is a bomb on board?
Just what good does the escorting fighter do? There is no way anyone is going to order the fighter to blow the pane full of passengers out of the sky. No politician, and few generals would have the guts to give that order, and it is political (or career) suicide to do so and they know it. The pilots are behind locked doors and unless they leave the cockpit and allow one of the hijackers/terrorists/whatever to pilot the pane into another building, the fighter is useless.
Seems to me to be a case of being sure to be seen Doing Something, even if it is useless and a waste of fuel and hours on the airframe.
B:
Sure sounds like it, but its also to stop anyone from turnign the plane into a flying bomb into something.
The one part that was a concern was that they didn't hurriedly get the passengers off.
If I'm on a plane and some idiot or actual terrorist makes a bomb threat, I want off that plane like yesterday, not sitting around waiting for them to say it's ok.
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