Indian airlines are facing a big problem: in recent days and weeks, dozens of flights have been diverted after they were targeted with nondescript bomb threats posted to various social media sites, including Elon Musk’s increasingly lawless X platform.
Every single one of these threats has proven to be a false alarm, but despite recent arrests, the hoaxes continue to disrupt various airlines, including Air India, IndiGo, and SpiceJet.
On Friday, Indian carrier Vistara became the latest airline to be targeted after a New Delhi to London flight was forced to make an emergency diversion to Frankfurt where passengers were evacuated and explosive sniffer dogs were sent in to sweep the plane for any evidence of a bomb.
Unsurprisingly, the threat posted on X proved to be a hoax.
Perhaps the most troubling incident so far involved Air India flight AI127 from Delhi to Chicago, which departed at 3:20 a.m. on Tuesday but ended up diverting to the remote Canadian town of Iqaluit on the vast ice-capped Baffin Island due to a bomb threat posted online.
The 211 passengers and crew onboard the Boeing 777-300 were left stranded in the Canadian wilderness and had to be rescued by the Canadian Royal Air Force which had to send a jet to pick them up and take everyone the rest of the way to Chicago.
At the time, Air India said it had decided to divert the plane because it was a “responsible” airline and therefore took the hoax threat as deadly serious.
It seems to me, however, that diverting a plane to a remote town in the middle of nowhere over a single bomb threat posted publicly on social media was anything but responsible.
Of course, safety is of paramount concern in the aviation industry. The airline industry’s focus on safety has made it the safest form of mass transit in the world, but that doesn’t mean that decision-makers aren’t allowed to use their judgment to determine whether a threat is actually genuine.
Of course, different countries face different terror threats, but it’s difficult to remember a time when a commercial airliner was the target of a bomb attack with prior notice by the terrorists or the organization behind the attack.
Let’s face it: if a commercial flight is targeted by a terrorist organization, there’s little to no chance that they are going to advertise the fact on social media.
That’s not to say that a criminal or terror organization might not want to alert the authorities to the fact that they’ve planted an improvised explosive device. Famously, this was the modus operandi in some of the attacks of the IRA in the 1980s and 1990s.
In those attacks, however, the authorities often could rely on the use of code words pre-registered with the intelligence services to determine whether a threat was genuine.
It certainly wasn’t foolproof, and there were lots of false alarms, but it became a crucial way to tell whether a threat posted by some bored teenager looking for kicks had any validity.
What we don’t know is whether Indian security forces have specific intelligence that could be behind what seems like a major overreaction of the country’s airlines. If, however, there isn’t any specific threat, then it becomes increasingly difficult to justify multiple diversions caused by copycat hoax messages.
There’s more risk of harm from diverting a plane… whether it be because a passenger risks running out of life-saving medicine because they’re stranded in a remote part of Canada or because they are injured while evacuating from a plane.
Here’s the crux. Indian airlines aren’t the only carriers receiving multiple bomb threats… you just don’t hear about many of these hoax pranks because the airlines and local security services involved have already decided that the danger isn’t genuine.
