[mikeocool]

> a flight attendant told passengers over the PA system that they "must turn off Bluetooth immediately," or else the aircraft would have to turn around.

So if the person just takes back their bomb threat everything is ok? Or did they think the terrorist labeled their Bluetooth bomb “bomb” and this would disable it?

[thih9]

I guess they assumed there were two scenarios:

1. It was unintentional; someone had a bluetooth device called BOMB for some reason that made sense before boarding the plane. They would turn it off.

2. It was intentional; someone wanted to send a warning and chose this channel - they would leave the device on.

[stefan_]

3. The level of tech illiteracy combined with airplane security theater is an affront to all thinking people.

[kube-system]

4. A normal level of risk aversion in one of the most risk averse industries

If airlines ignored every threat that was “probably not” a real threat, they’d ignore all of them. It’s better to inconvenience a few thousand passengers than it is to kill a few hundred.

[Haven880]

How many threats did actually turn out to be real to date? I couldn't find this being published. But how many threats did happen without any indication (only after the perpetrators tell). I can easily recalled maybe 3-4 incidents. So the issue here is do knowing threats really help?

[kube-system]

You only hear the edge cases in the news. There are tens of thousands of incidents of unruly passengers some of which are just threats and some are actual violence.

But also, just because someone is making what could be perceived as a threat doesn’t mean it won’t escalate, which is why threats are taken seriously even if we don’t know whether something is guaranteed to go wrong. You don’t want a crazy person making bomb threats on a flight even if they don’t have a bomb, because they can inflict other issues while trapped in a metal tube at cruising altitude.

https://www.iata.org/en/iata-repository/pressroom/fact-sheet...

[wat10000]

The industry is usually smarter than this.

For example, there are many pieces of equipment that can be broken and they’ll still fly, because it’s not essential or there’s enough redundancy.

Child safety seats are not required even though they’d save lives, because the extra hassle and expense would cause some parents to drive instead, which is much more dangerous, leading to more overall deaths.

Normally the decisions are quite sensible. But the moment any “terrorism” enters the picture it all goes out the window.

[kube-system]

All of those have the luxury of risk evaluation in advance

[f33d5173]

No they wouldn't. A fundamental part of a threat is to make it very clear that there's a threat. The reason you threaten is to get some concession, otherwise you wouldn't bother threatening.

[kube-system]

This is at odds with basically every major security incident postmortem in recent history.

Most security failures happen when people wait to take something seriously until it is “very clear” that something is wrong.

We have the luxury of hindsight while reading this article but listen to the tapes of any security failures and you’ll find it painfully obvious that the most common issue is that people don’t do anything until it’s too late.

[f33d5173]

That has nothing to do with what we're talking about. We're discussing threats. Serious threats are made seriously.

[stefan_]

You don't have your head quite on, they had already taken off!

[kube-system]

Yeah, that’s how diversions work?

[basilikum]

There was literally no threat.

[victorbjorklund]

They did not know if it was a threat or not. Hindsight is everything.

[Skunkleton]

In the simplest possible terms: this is total bullshit security theatre. At no point has there ever been a bomb or even a bomb threat carried out via usb device names. There is absolutely no reason to even look at the names of Bluetooth devices on a flight.

[umanwizard]

A normal level of risk aversion? Are you being serious? They inconvenienced a few thousand passengers to save zero.

[kube-system]

Without testing the null hypothesis that is not possible to determine. There doesn’t have to be an actual bomb for an unruly passenger to inflict injuries or death.

[jychang]

It wasn't a bomb threat: https://hellottec.com/product/bomb-portable-bluetooth-speake...

[croes]

> This website has been temporarily rate limited

[dfxm12]

The url conveys the relevant information.

[tuumi]

Why are people not reading the article!!!! It was a Fitbit. Best not to get news based on Reddit conjecture. It's wild how many people are running with the speaker thing.

[lazide]

Apparently it wasn’t a threat - a kid had a commercial Bluetooth speaker that names itself as ‘bomb’. No one on the plane did anything intentionally.

[jim33442]

Was wondering the same thing. Maybe there's some regulation about this, but the flight crew wanted to bend the rule to keep the plane going, figuring it was just a poorly named device.