Bomb threat forces emergency landing

A Southwest Airlines flight from Las Vegas to Connecticut made an emergency landing in Nebraska after a person who missed the flight said something about a bomb being on board Saturday night, an airline spokeswoman said.

The passenger who missed the nonstop flight made a statement about a bag and then made a bomb threat specific to Flight 1018, spokeswoman Christi Day said.

Day said she didn’t know whether the threat was made to a gate agent in Las Vegas or by telephone. The threat was made at 8:40 p.m. Central Standard Time, Day said, which would have been 6:40 p.m. Pacific time, just about two hours after the plane left Las Vegas.

The plane landed in Omaha about an hour after the threat, according to Day.

No explosives were found after the plane landed , and the 137 passengers on Flight 1018 continued on to Hartford after the unexpected layover of just over three hours, Day said.

Day had no additional information about the person who made the bomb threat. Las Vegas police, who assist with security at McCarran International Airport, said they had no information available regarding the case.

The FBI did not return the Review-Journal’s call.

Upon leaving the plane in Omaha, passengers were bused to a field maintenance building while security personnel using bomb-sniffing dogs searched passenger and baggage compartments. Individual pieces of luggage also were searched on the tarmac.

One of the passengers was Jed Geary, a 37-year-old guidance counselor who was returning to the East Coast with his wife and two young sons after attending his father’s funeral in Las Vegas. Geary said the pilot announced that he had to land because of a bomb threat made by someone who apparently had too much to drink.

Geary said he could understand why the plane had to land, but he couldn’t understand why security personnel didn’t immediately evacuate passengers.

“If there’s an emergency that is taken seriously enough to have us landing, then it would seem that we should have been taken off the plane immediately,” Geary said from his Massachussets home.

Day said Southwest acted in accordance with the wishes of federal authorities.

Nico Melendez, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, disputed Geary’s contention about the length of the passengers’ wait aboard the plane.

The wait was actually 30 to 45 minutes, he said. Melendez said authorities wanted to make sure the passengers had warm buses in which to ride from the runway to the terminal.

Day said that if the threat had been deemed “high level” then the passengers would have been immediately evacuated.

Passengers went through a security screening before reboarding, and their flight arrived in Hartford about four hours late, Geary said.