A JetBlue Flight's Radio Stopped Working Before Takeoff, So The Pilot Mistakenly Called In A Hijacking Code And Led To The Plane Being Stormed By Emergency Services. Whoopsie Daisy!
NY Post- A JetBlue pilot accidentally reported that his plane was being hijacked at JFK, triggering a massive response of cops and firefighters who surrounded the craft on the tarmac, officials said. The pilot of Flight 1623, bound for Los Angeles, tried to punch in the code alerting JFK’s tower that the craft’s radio wasn’t working – but inadvertently hit keys that signaled a hijacking, law enforcement sources said. So without verbal contact with Flight 1623 and the manually entered code for a hijacking, authorities at JFK had no choice but to assume the worst.
Port Authority police, its Emergency Services Unit, K-9 units, firefighters and ambulances all rushed to the scene.
That’s a Jimbo! Look, I’m not here to criticize pilots. We all complain about how much we hate flying and these people do it for a living. My dumb brain doesn’t even understand how a plane is able to fly, let alone the trillions of things you need to know to take off, keep it in the air, and then land. But if your radio goes out, you cannot be calling in fake hijackings by mistake in the same city where the most infamous terrorist hijacking took place. Even if the code for “Our Plane Is Being Hijacked By Terrorist Scumbags” is 911 and the code for “My Radio Is Broken” is 912. Yeah that would be a silly way to setup the codes, but still. You MUST take your time punching that code in and making sure you didn’t fat finger anything so your plane doesn’t get stormed like the Griswold house at the end of Christmas Vacation.
Then again, if this pilot wants to spinzone the whole thing, I guess he can lean back on the whole incident being a live drill that not even the highest in command knew about.
“That brought everyone and their mother out to the tarmac,” a law enforcement source said. “Most people (cops and firefighters on the scene) have never responded to a hijacking, other than in training.”
It’s one thing to storm a plane during a drill. It’s quite another when the bright lights are on and everyone thinks there’s actually a legit hijacking going down. And if you are going to pull a move like that, you better do it on a wonderful airline like JetBlue that has DirecTV in every seat and by farrrrrr the best snacks in the airline game. A few extra bags of blue chips and I bet everyone forgot the abject terror of a SWAT team storming their plane.
