What was supposed to be a smooth crossing of the Atlantic turned into a real headache for the passengers on the United Airlines flight from Newark to the island of Mallorca. No one expected that, in the 21st century, a mobile phone configuration could cause such a commotion on a transatlantic route like this.
Technology sometimes plays tricks on us due to pure carelessness, but on this occasion it wasn't a random technical failure, but rather a incident involving a 16-year-old who decided it would be a good idea to rename his Wi-Fi connection with a word that should never be uttered in an airport. What began as a supposed youthful prank ended up mobilizing the airline's security personnel within minutes.
Tension thousands of feet above the ocean
As the aircraft was already flying over the Atlantic and the passengers were settling in for the remaining hours of flight, the crew detected a signal that triggered all the alarms in the cabin. Apparently, someone had had the unfortunate idea of Name your Bluetooth device "Bomba", a term that automatically triggered the company's strictest emergency protocols.
The atmosphere in the cabin heated up quite quickly because, understandably, receiving an order to immediately shut down all devices in the middle of nowhere is not something anyone enjoys. Despite the desperate attempts by the assistants to identify the origin From that signal before making a drastic decision, the impossibility of locating the exact terminal on the fly forced us to follow the air safety manual to the letter.
Forced return and the legal consequences
Faced with the uncertainty of not knowing whether it was a real threat or simply a bad joke, the pilots decided that the most sensible thing to do was return immediately to Newark airportYou can't play around with the safety of hundreds of people, and the airline's headquarters preferred that the plane be inspected on the ground by teams specializing in bomb disposal and terrorist threats.
Upon landing back on US soil, the police deployment was breathtaking, with patrol cars and officers waiting on the tarmac to evacuate and search every corner of the aircraft. After a thorough inspection that confirmed there was no danger, the perpetrator of the maneuver was identified: a minor who He was arrested by local authorities and now faces potentially serious legal charges for the enormous mobilization of resources that his action caused.
What's clear after this incident is that practical jokes in commercial aviation are extremely costly and that safety doesn't care about teenage pranks. The trip, whose final destination was to enjoy the Mallorcan coast, ended up becoming a dance of delays and police procedures which ruined the start of the holidays for more than a hundred people because of a simple name change in the settings of a mobile device.