US-bound Egypt plane diverted after threat

US-bound Egypt plane diverted after threat

www.guardian.co.uk

CAIRO (AP) — British fighter aircraft escorted a plane from Cairo bound for New York to an emergency landing in the U.K. after a passenger discovered a letter onboard threatening to blow up the aircraft, officials said Saturday.
Flight 985 to John F. Kennedy Airport had around 300 passengers onboard when it was diverted to Glasgow's Prestwick Airport after a passenger found the letter in a lavatory, EgyptAir chairman Tawfiq Assi said.

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The flight is now being checked by a technical team which includes bomb disposal experts. Passengers were let off to wait in Glasgow's airport, and officials are also looking into their backgrounds. Hopefully they get to continue their journey soon.

Seems a strange thing to do, if you planned on blowing up a plane why leave a note in the bathroom? Hopefully it was just some loony after attention and nothing more sinister.

www.guardian.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by Lady_Tuatha


That's the first thing that crossed my mind too. The people who would attack something like an airliner must spend some days so amused by things like this, they just chuckle to themselves for the whole thing. I mean really, when was the last time a bombing came with a helpful note to the VICTIMS about to be blown to pieces that "Smile! You're all going to die!". :shk:

On the other hand, playing the world's security services and commercial industry like a bad skit on Saturday Night Live must truly be no end of entertainment to a real attack minded individual.

Bin Laden indicated before 9/11 that the Western nations could never be beaten on the Battlefield. Whatever or Whoever he might have been. He was right about that and was intelligent enough about his own weaknesses to acknowledge them (what a novel thought). He indicated that breaking the West financially was the goal and outcome to seek. $100 in Al Qaeda threat translates to $1 Million in Western response.

In this case? It sounds like a $1 Bic Pen and a $.05 sheet of paper cost what is probably 10's of thousands of dollars by the time it's done. Don't they ever get tired of being played for fools and jumping like Pavlov's Dog?

Ive just read about this on the BBC website

www.bbc.co.uk...

Hopefully, as you say, its just attention seeking by an individual idiot!

My question is though,

The flight was Cairo to New York, now im not claiming to know flight routes, but is Glasgow anywhere near the route this plane would fly? also, was Glasgow chosen as a divert destination simply because it was the nearest airport at the time the alarm was raised? or does Glasgow/Prestwick Airport have some kind of specialist anti-terrorist team based there?

Mick

Bizarre. I've been waiting for more news on this but there doesn't seem to be much coming, last I heard the passengers were still on the plane being questioned. I can't help but think between Cairo and Glasgow that's only about 3 hours, there can't have been all that many people visiting the toilet that early into a US bound flight, perhaps it was even one of the cleaning staff that left it when it was sitting at Cairo, some kind of sick practical joke or something.

Something else just crossed my mind on this. Since the Security Services just love finding new reasons to be scared of their very own shadows....How's this for a happy thought on the next one of these stupid notes?

What if, for the sake of argument, I'm a mad bomber type with an attitude and dislike of airliners. So..I decide I'd like one better landing in 10,000 pieces than at an airport?

Well.... Perhaps I would build my little gift of doom with an altimeter switch that armed as it crossed above ..say, 15,000 feel AGL and then did nothing more. Just sat there while some Homer Simpson in the cabin found the note. Then, because I'd be a real sick bastard to have done this much to start with.....I add a little special sauce of evil to my plans. I set up the trigger so the armed device at high altitude gets an attitude when it comes back down. (rubs paws together in a master villain laugh)

Awww... Now landing to find the bomb will have located the bomb as intended ....at 15,000 feet on the descent. Yup... There it is! I foun........(silence ever more).

...If I was a REAL sick person, I'd even avail myself of modern technology and build GPS into the whole rotten cupcake of death and insure it didn't blow up if no one found the note and it's descent came over Egypt, as scheduled. After all, being a Jihadi in this example, I wouldn't want Cairo scattered with broken airplane. Just the logical diversion point for a transatlantic flight. Muhahahahaha.

This is why we;d actually want to spend billions to make sure so much as a firecracker couldn't get ON the plane in the first............err...Oh wait, we already do that too you say? Well. Nuts.

reply to post by Ramcheck


Or a teenager could have written it. It is also weird that they would keep the passengers on board for a further 3 hours after it landed at Glasgow, you would think they would question them off the plane? especially if there was a chance they could be in danger. I would not be a happy bunny on that flight!

reply to post by ukmicky1980


I have no idea. I would guess it would be down to location. I think most airports have been trained well enough to deal with these sorts of situations these days.

Originally posted by Lady_Tuatha
reply to post by Ramcheck

 

Or a teenager could have written it. It is also weird that they would keep the passengers on board for a further 3 hours after it landed at Glasgow, you would think they would question them off the plane? especially if there was a chance they could be in danger. I would not be a happy bunny on that flight!

Yeah apparently they're all off the plane now. Still not much in the way of updates.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


well I for one am glad that you are not on the darkside lol!

How about this - Arrange multiple notes on multiple flights, chaos! you would need a few people tho. Really its scary how much a scrap of paper can freak people out.

I must admit tho if I were on that plane I would be glad of them checking it out properly.

reply to post by Lady_Tuatha


I wonder... Would you really be glad? Seriously. If your trip to Cairo was to rush to the death bed of a loved one or, perhaps equally important, to serve a Government for some critical and breaking situation that lives were impacted by....would you be glad you now missed getting there because they went ballistic over someone's scribble on a piece of paper?

I 'kinda' got this level of response back when airport security was a hit and miss affair with private security and it happened exceptionally rarely as I seem to remember it. However, they could reasonably consider missing a bomb as a possibility. Now? Well, if they can't find it....it's not for lack of manpower looking up and inside all our woo-hoo's for everything and anything they care to look for. It's not for lack of money and technology.

I think of these incidents as a world wide admission of "Look! We know our security is absolutely without depth and we don't trust it either! Watch us divert the plane to prove it!".

One update from the record. The note was found by a BBC employee..

www.dailyrecord.co.uk...

BBC employee Nada Tafik claimed she found the handwritten note in the bathroom of the aircraft, which said: "I set this plane on fire" and also had a seat number noted next to it.

Originally posted by Lady_Tuatha


The flight is now being checked by a technical team which includes bomb disposal experts. Passengers were let off to wait in Glasgow's airport, and officials are also looking into their backgrounds. Hopefully they get to continue their journey soon.

Seems a strange thing to do, if you planned on blowing up a plane why leave a note in the bathroom? Hopefully it was just some loony after attention and nothing more sinister.

www.guardian.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

your first paragraph sort of answers your subsequent question

Social Engineering would be my guess, think of it as hacking the matrix, somebody just exposed a Systempunkt for all to see

A systempunkt is a point in a system reactive to many small interactions, which through a network of objects in a surrounding environment or dependent network, exhibits a cascading collapse in the specific system and possibly the networked components. A systempunkt may be vulnerable to operational failure, but it is neither vulnerable because of operation or location, but rather its operation interacts through communication, exchange or movement of objects and these disrupted dependencies of flows of data, or goods will be the failure when it is no longer operating. The effects on the network are more significant than those on the specific object.

in this form it's called "bleeding the beast" or "Death by a 1000 cuts" as in: a simple note caused all this hassle and cost the beast a pretty penny

Archimedes would be proud

surely you don't think The System is going to be defeated using guns, that's Oldstyle
welcome to 4G Warfare AND 5g Warfare. 4G war is network against state. 5G is network against network.

globalguerrillas.typepad.com...

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


I can see your point, but for me personally I really would be glad of them diverting the plane, annoyed yes but glad. I am an anxious flyer at the best of times so I would probably start having a panic attack if they didnt. I suppose it depends if it was made aware to me when I was on the plane, ignorance is bliss sometimes.

reply to post by Ramcheck


Jeez, sounds like someone was trying to set someone else up, either that or they are completely nuts.

This could be interesting I am about to go look up some more but my knee jerk reaction to this is why on earth would a would be terrorist have a letter threatening to blow up the aircraft?

surly if he really did have a bomb he would just blow the plane up and be done with it or use the bomb as some kind of threat.

will be interesting to see how things proceed

reply to post by ukmicky1980

The flight was Cairo to New York, now im not claiming to know flight routes, but is Glasgow anywhere near the route this plane would fly? also, was Glasgow chosen as a divert destination simply because it was the nearest airport at the time the alarm was raised? or does Glasgow/Prestwick Airport have some kind of specialist anti-terrorist team based there?

To answer your question, Glasgow Prestwick and Standstead airport are specially designated airports to deal with any kind of emergency of this nature so if possible any aircraft that say for example has a passenger saying he is going to blow up the plane, will be diverted to one of those two airports.

I think Standstead is usually the preferred airport but quite a few have been landed at Glasgow;

sorry don't have a link for you just a bit of random trivia

reply to post by OtherSideOfTheCoin
Maybe, paper is far easier to get through security and onto a plane and this person had no intention of getting a bomb on the craft. The person may just have been trying to see what security protocols are in place for this particular route or they wanted to cause panic and ruin people's day without a real loss of life etc...

This is certainly a way to disrupt the system and it is going to affect many more passenger down the line as we will probably have to surrender all pen and paper prior to boarding or something.

reply to post by evc1shop


That is totally possible that its just a bit of paper saying "i have a bomb" just to test the Airliner response although why anyone would want to do that i don't do.

I can recall the press doing it once to Prince William's security detail when he was at St. Andrews University they smuggled a fake bomb into one of his lecture theaters just to demonstrate how easy it would be and get his security to work harder.

but i really cant see any point in doing that with a airline

also the disruption this has caused is isolated really to the poor folks that were on the plane there wont really be any wider disruption, might cause a delay somewhere

I would doubt we will have to start surrendering our paper and pens to get on a plane.

reply to post by ukmicky1980


When traveling East to West flights go up and around instead of a straight line. Anything out of the European part of three world will go up towards the North Atlantic, then drop down on the East Coast of the US. Flights from the US to Asia go up along the coast to Alaska and drop down near Russia.

The jetstream runs West to East, so flying a straight line would require more fuel than the plane can carry during peak winds. If you're flying the other direction this probes to be to your advantage, and I've seen planes that didn't have the range to fly nonstop make it work reserves left after picking up 140+ knot tailwinds.