A United Airlines flight was diverted after a bomb threat note in the bathroom was found, along with a suspicious bag.
United Airlines Flight 1533 departed Newark International Airport in New Jersey shortly after 6am on Wednesday for Los Angeles. Instead, the Boeing 787 made an emergency landing at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago at 7.44am.
A note was discovered in the restroom stating that the plane would blow up. A bomb-sniffing police dog found a suspicious bag linked to the note, an airline source told CBS 2. A robot was deployed to move the bag, and cops questioned the passenger who checked it in.
It was not immediately known if there were any suspicious contents in the bag.
United Airlines told KTLA 5 News that ‘flight 1533 diverted to Chicago this morning due to a potential security concern’ and that ‘the flight landed safely and met local law enforcement upon arrival’.
Passengers got off the plane and were expected to depart for their destination in the afternoon.
A passenger on the flight, Rashad Robinson, wrote on X (Twitter) that ‘someone allegedly went into the bathroom and made a bomb threat on the bathroom window and now we’ve made an emergency landing in Chicago’.
Robinson added that another passenger said someone entered the bathroom and wrote on the mirror.
About five hours later, Robinson wrote that passengers were back aboard the same plane ‘and trusting that all the checks and searches were made and we are safe’. He thanked the airline staff for being ‘warm and responsive’.
‘Waking up to a bomb scare is something I’ll never forget,’ he said.
It was not the only bomb threat-related issue in air travel in the US this week.
A 27-year-old man was boarding a JetBlue Airways flight from San Francisco to Fort Lauderdale on his 27th birthday on Saturday when he ‘joked that TSA had missed a bomb in his bag’, according to a Broward Sheriff’s Office arrest report.
When a flight attendant confronted Mack Bjorn, of Reno, Nevada, he ‘reaffirmed that the TSA missed the bomb in his bag’, according to the arrest report obtained by WPLG. He was charged with making a false report of a bomb, weapon of mass destruction or arson.
The incident comes a couple of months after a 14-year-old girl’s family sued American Airlines after a flight attendant allegedly taped an iPhone to a plane toilet seat and recorded her using the bathroom.
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