Korean Airlines jet forced to land after bomb threat

UPDATE:
The passengers were forced to stay overnight on Vancouver Island while the plane was swept for anything threatening. No bombs were found on board except Happy Feet Two and The Tower Heist on the video-on-demand system. The plane took off and is headed for South Korea as we speak.

ORIGINAL POST:
I hate flying. I understand the technical aspects of how an object that weighs hundreds of tons can fly through the air even though I, at a mere 68 kilograms, cannot.

Last January, when the Los Angeles to Honolulu flight I was on took on obvious detour up the coast of California instead of heading straight out to sea, I was more than a little nervous that someone had quietly taken over the cockpit and was aiming us at, I don't know, the Golden Gate Bridge or possibly some redwoods. (Going toward the Bay Area from LAX is about 90° off from the direction we should have been heading.)

But I can only imagine the horror of being on this Korean Airlines flight from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Incheon International Airport near Seoul:

A Korean Airlines Boeing 777 en route from Vancouver to Seoul was diverted to a nearby Canadian Forces base after the airline’s U.S. call center received a bomb threat.

Korean Airlines said in a news release that the call center received the threat today (Hawaii time) about 25 minutes after take-off from Vancouver International Airport. Airline officials said they decided to turn the aircraft around.

Maj. Holly Apostoliuk, a Canadian spokeswoman for The North American Aerospace Defense Command, said two U.S. F-15 fighter jets from Portand, Oregon escorted the plane to Canada’s Comox air base on Vancouver Island, which is 113 miles (182 kilometers) outside Vancouver.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Inspector Byron Massie said the plane was still being searched early Wednesday morning.

Massie said the same Korean Airlines flight out of Vancouver faced a similar threat on Monday and the all clear was given after a two hour search. He said Monday’s threat was called in somewhere besides the airline’s U.S. call center but he declined to say where.

Actually, I might be able to imagine their horror: Sometime in the 1990s I was on a Northwest flight from Kimpo to Tokyo that made an abrupt U-turn over the East Sea (Sea of Japan). They forced us to stay on the tarmac in a hot plane without air conditioning for about two hours before they had us deplane. We were told engine parts had fallen out an air duct.

Um, anyway. I wonder how many of these threats that KAL gets. I mean, two in three days. Sheesh.

... 

Korean Airlines faux hijacking and landing at Whitehorse Airport

I only vaguely remember reading about this story in the aftermath of 9/11, what with the sadness and anger over so much death and then the march to war in Afghanistan when the Taliban would not give up Osama bin Laden and the rest of al Qaeda who were using their country as a base.

It is the story of how two Korean Airlines jumbo jets were forced to land at Whitehorse International Airport way up in the Yukon when someone flying the plane or directing air traffic sent messages indicating they had been hijacked:

One of the double-decker planes first raised an alarm at 9:06 a.m. PT, three hours and 21 minutes after American Airlines Flight 11 plowed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

That was when the United States Federal Aviation Administration was informed that a text message containing the international code for hijacking — HJK — had passed between the cockpit of Flight 085 and Korean Air's ground control at 8:09 a.m. Although it was, and still is, unclear which end was sending the message, it was remarkable as it was the only such text message sent that day.

It was also remarkable for those monitoring the plane at the time because when ground control spoke to the plane's pilot, he reported all was well.

Meanwhile in the U.S., then-vice-president Dick Cheney had authorized his country's war planes to "intercept civilian tracks of interest and shoot them down if they seem to be threatening a U.S. city. Clearance to shoot is authorized to save lives on the ground."

In other words: If the Air Force brass believed a plane full of people was going crash into another American building, they were to blow it out of the sky.

The 230 souls on board Flight 085 had no idea they were being tracked by two fighter jets with shoot-to-kill authorization, and only the crew knew what had happened in New York City to justify such an order.

The residents of Whitehorse (the capital of the territory but with only twenty thousand folks) were evacuated and this apparently left a very indelible mark on the collective memory. Enough that someone made a documentary out if it, Never Happen Here — the Whitehorse 9/11 Story.

Here's the trailer for the documentary:



I'm interested in this in part due to the obvious Korea connection. Imagine if American or Canadian military had shot down a plane full of civilians and it turned out there was no hijacking emergency whatsoever. That could have led to ill will of such colossal proportions it might have tipped the political balance in Northeast Asia.