An airline Twitter threat has actually affected a plane. United Airlines flight from New York's JFK Airport to Washington Dulles International Airport was delayed on Wednesday night because someone had tweeted a bomb threat on the flight to the airline's Twitter account.
An airline security official noticed the tweet before takeoff. The tweet read, "There is a bomb on a United Airlines flight from JFK to Dulles." United Flight 5714 was supposed to leave JFK at 7:35 p.m.. Passengers had already started boarding the plane when the tweet was seen at about 7:05 p.m, the Associated Press reports.
All of the 49 passenger on the Bombardier CRJ200 regional jet had to evacuate so that screws could search the plane for explosives. Nothing was found, but the bomb threat caused a big inconvenience for passengers as they had to be searched again and their luggage was rescreened and the flight was delayed for more than an hour.
The plane was cleared for takeoff and left the gate at 9:19 p.m. It arrived in Washington, D.C. at 10:31 p.m. and was an hour and 38 minutes late.
Twitter threats against airlines have been a threat this week after a 14-year-old Dutch girl pretended to be a terrorist and joked with American Airlines that she would do something bad on June 1. The airline told her they reported her to the FBI as they take joke threats seriously. The girl later turned herself in to Rotterdam police and was arrested for making the false threat. Since that incident, many Internet trolls have been harassing airlines, making false threats.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
