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Passengers On Flight From Texas Told To Search Their Own Bags For Bombs After Bomb Threat Discovered

By Tara West
Published on: 07:41 PST, Jan 24, 2016

Passengers on an Istanbul bound Turkish Airlines flight from Houston, Texas, were allegedly awoken in the night on their Trans-Atlantic flight and told to search their own bags for bombs after a handwritten bomb threat was discovered in the bathroom. One passenger said that after the bomb threat was discovered, the passengers were told to wake up from their sleep as cushions were stripped from the plane seats, and the travelers were told to check their own bags for bombs.

The Daily Mail reported that passengers on a trans-Atlantic flight out of Texas were startled when crew on their Turkish Airlines flight began stripping seats on the plane looking for potential bombs. The passengers were then told to check their own luggage for anything suspicious. The whole ordeal began when someone found a “bomb threat” in the bathroom of the airplane. A napkin with the word “bomb” on it was discovered and crew began their frantic search for any signs of a threat. However, when the “bomb” note was discovered, the plane was already well over the Atlantic ocean with nowhere to land. Passengers said the crew began a search for a bomb device on their own, stripping seats of cushions and informing travelers that they should check their own carry-on luggage for potential bombs.

While passenger Erez Liberman Aiden said the flight crew was “well-meaning” he said he didn’t think having passengers check their own baggage for bombs was the best idea mid-flight. Aiden was not just any passenger he is a well-known biophysicist who has been honored by President Obama and is the co-creator, with Jean-Baptiste Michel, of an addicting tool that lets anyone search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries via Google.

On his personal website, Aiden notes that he is a professor of Genetics and has established a Center for Genome Architecture at Rice University.

“I am currently an assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics at the Baylor College of Medicine, where I direct the newly-established Center for Genome Architecture, and in the Department of Computer Science and Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University across the street.”

Therefore, when the biophysicist was on-board the Istanbul-bound Turkish Airlines flight, he used his brain to get to the bottom of the issue. Aiden said that in the middle of the night he was awoken by crew who stripped cushions and asked passengers to check their bags. Not knowing what was happening, Aiden said he purchased a $15 mid-flight Internet package and began searching the issue for himself. What he discovered was that his airplane was no longer on course for Istanbul but had changed paths and was heading toward Ireland. He also discovered some unnerving information about Turkish Airlines and their past with bomb threats.

Despite his Google search info, the biophysicist said that flight crew never told passengers why they were being diverted until several hours after landing at the Shannon Airport in Ireland. He said they were simply told a “security issue” caused them to divert. However, he said the scene on the flight was rather odd with crew ripping up seat cushions, asking passengers to check their bags for unusual items, and informing the passengers they would likely see “fuel ejected” from the plane but that it was “completely normal.”

What do you think about the unusual way that the Turkish Airlines crew handled the bomb threat while traversing over the Atlantic Ocean?

[Image via Shutterstock]

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