I think it goes without saying—calling in a bomb threat to bring a plane back to the gate because you missed your flight is a very stupid idea. It’s a federal crime. It’s going to scare people. It’s going to inconvenience people. It will land you in jail.
So, of course, on Wednesday a man at the Seattle airport called in a bomb threat because his plane was taking off without him. And he’s a doctor! You’d think that doctors would have sense!
According to an FBI affidavit filed in support of the complaint, Chiu admitted that he used a payphone at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to call 911 three times after he arrived at the gate too late to board his Northwest Airlines flight Wednesday. “Flight 980 Memphis. There may be a bomb on board,” Chiu was quoted as telling the emergency operator.
“After his first phone call, he looked outside at the plane and saw that his call had had ’no effect,”’ FBI agent Gary France wrote. “He made a second phone call and noticed that this call too had no effect. This led to the third call.
“Chiu stated that he made the calls thinking that the airline ’would ground the plane for a couple of hours,’ because bomb threats are taken seriously. When asked how he thought other passengers might react when they overheard his calls, he conceded that he thought ’they would be traumatized,”’ the affidavit said.
Oh, the thought process! The stupid! It burns us, Precious!
Let’s try and enter this doctor’s mind. He misses his flight. He calls in a bomb threat on the flight in the hopes that the plane will return to the terminal, which will give him the opportunity to board the plane later. This doesn’t work, so he calls in the bomb threat twice more, thereby panicking the passengers aboard the plane, the airport, and costing Northwest Airlines, according to MSNBC, seventy thousand dollars in expenses.
And for his trouble, he gets himself arrested, and he’ll be facing jail time.
I appreciate that he missed his flight, but dude! Suck it up. Don’t threaten an airplane. Don’t frighten strangers half out of their minds. You’d think a doctor would have, y’know, sense. I mean, jeez, how many freaking years did he spend in school? Did he learn anything? Like, oh, don’t call in bomb threats because he missed his flight?
What a maroon. 