Two days ago, Vinod Moorjani, a 45-year-old CEO of an IT company, was scheduled to fly from Mumbai to Delhi en route to Virginia with his family. As the flight was delayed because of bad weather, Moorjani called the toll-free number linked to the Mumbai International Airport to find out the status of the “Bom-Del” flight. The operator, however, heard him saying “bomb hai”. Two hours later, Moorjani, his wife and children were offloaded from the flight to Delhi.
Unfortunately, this was not the first case of a bomb hoax being detected in a flight last year. In February, for example, an Air Asia flight from Bengaluru to Kochi was delayed by almost seven hours after a couple, who was running late, got their relatives to call the airport to delay the flight. The relatives informed the airport authorities that there was a bomb in the flight and the baggage of all 180 passengers were screened again.
In August, an Indian Navy officer was detained in Jodhpur for falsely claiming he was carrying a bomb aboard an Air India flight flying from Delhi to Jaipur via Jodhpur. The officer wanted to deboard at Jodhpur but was prevented from doing so as he had booked the flight to Jaipur. He forcibly tried to deboard and delayed the flight by three hours. In October, the call centre of the Delhi airport got a call about a bomb on a flight from Delhi to Mumbai. An hour later, the call was declared to be a hoax. In November, a GoAir flight from Delhi to Kolkata landed in Kolkata under emergency conditions because of a bomb scare that later turned out to be a hoax. In December, a Turkish Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency diversion after a passenger named a Wi-Fi network ‘bomb on board’.
In many cases, passengers cry ‘bomb’ for their own selfish reasons—to delay flights and to deboard at the port of their preference or worse, as a joke to fool the authorities. It seems society is spiraling downwards when people have no concern for others and no value for their time. One cannot emphasise enough the panic that can be triggered in a flight when someone talks of a bomb inside, because a plane is a confined space. If you see a suspicious man following you in the street, you can walk in the other direction, call your family or inform the police. When you’re in the air, you cannot really do anything in the case of a bomb scare. You cannot run away or call an expert to defuse it. That sense of helplessness can be crippling.
One cannot really blame airport officials for taking bomb threats seriously. Each of them is made to undergo a course in aviation security so that they understand how dangerous such a threat can be. One can be imprisoned for up to three years for deliberately triggering a bomb scare.
It’s not just by creating bomb hoaxes that unruly passengers disrupt flights. In March, Shiv Sena MP Ravindra Gaikwad’s assault on an Air India staffer made front page news. He was seen on TV boasting about hitting the airline employee with his sandals 25 times. In November, a Qatar Airways flight en route from Bali to Doha was forced to divert to Chennai after a furious Iranian woman created a ruckus upon learning that her husband was cheating on her.
In an era when time is so important, and events are slotted into packed schedules, the cost to a passenger who is forced to postpone his meetings and cancel bookings because of a delayed or diverted flight could be immense. What can one do about it? Increase punishment to the offenders? Beef up airport security? Start teaching a course on how to show concern for the needs of others? If that can be taught, then it might be the answer to a lot of our prayers.
