The recent spurt in bomb threats on several Indian airlines has crippled operations, thrown flight schedules out of gear and generally made life unbearable for flyers. Reports show that in the three-year period from 2014-17, the Indian airline industry had received about 120 bomb threats. To understand the severity of the current problem, let us consider the week from October 14-20. There were bomb threats on around 100 flights in this period. That works out to an average of 14 threats per day!
The chaos this has led to at airports and on planes can be well imagined. A flight that faces a bomb threat has to find a landing slot immediately at a nearby airport. On the ground, heavy-duty bandobast has to be made at a short notice, with police, ambulances, bomb squad experts and others ready to take over as soon as the plane lands. Flying protocols across the world are very strict, and a bomb threat can mean not just irate passengers on board, but also real financial losses for the airline. Very often, a flight that receives a bomb threat will have to dump fuel before it reaches the requisite weight for it to make an emergency landing. And then there are the passengers. Their holiday plans or work schedules get inevitably upended, and for those with connecting flights, God save them from the nightmarish ordeal of having to rework their travel plans.
Matters have come to such a head in the past week that the Union Civil Aviation Minister, Ram Mohan Naidu, addressed the press on Monday on the issue. He spoke about how all the threats had proved to be hoaxes, but nonetheless, each one had to be assessed with equal gravity. His department has held meeting with airlines to get their assessment of the situation and find ways to sort out the issues. “There has to be some kind of deterrent and that is what we are doing with our planned amendments to the rules and the Act. We are working with the Ministry of Home Affairs and state law enforcement agencies to speed up the investigations into the threats. The safety and security of passengers and their convenient travel is our utmost priority,” he said at the press conference. He stressed that hoax bomb threats would be made into a cognisable offence with fines and punishment, and people found guilty of making such threats would be put on a no-fly list.
While that sounds like decisive action on paper, it is actually quite tricky to pinpoint a threat caller. Some of the threats have been traced to foreign IP addresses. Last week, a 17-year-old school dropout was arrested over issuing hoax bomb threats from a social media account. But very often, threats come in as hoax calls, emails or posts on unknown social media accounts. The very nature of digital media allows camouflage and it is difficult to pinpoint the person/s involved, or motives. For example, the 17-year-old apparently had a tiff with his friend, and decided to create a fake social media account in his friend’s name to issue the threats. His plan was to get his friend into trouble in this manner.
An investigation revealed that over one-third of the threats were made from an anonymous and unverified account on X. The account was active till Saturday afternoon, but X has suspended it since then. The police are still trying to track the origins of some of the other threats, but the job at hand will not prove easy. Even as threats multiply, unexpected problems are cropping up. A Vistara flight on its way to Frankfurt was refused permission to land by Afghanistan, forcing the plane to return to India. In another incident, Singapore sent fighter jets to escort an Indian flight that had received a bomb threat.
From the sudden, steep uptick in bomb threats on flights, it is obvious that all of these incidents are neither stray happenings, nor are they the work of some adolescent malcontent looking for validation or notoriety. There is no way to determine yet if the threats are the handiwork of a mastermind or a closed group of people. But as anxious flyers grapple with the sudden surge in such threats, they will also have to adjust to the delays and inevitable changes in their travel. Till the authorities find the root of the problem, a little dose of stoicism while entering an airport can go a long way in these uncertain times.