A passenger on the Air New Zealand flight that suffered a bomb threat at Sydney Airport on Saturday night has revealed a new theory about what caused it.
“There may have been a note on the plane, that’s what caused this, so we all assumed the note had been picked up on the plane,” Penny Nel said. Radio New Zealand.
The flight with 140 passengers from Wellington landed in Sydney at around 5.40pm, but remained parked and isolated on the tarmac after a bomb threat was reported on board.
Up to 40 emergency teams, including heavily armed officers, responded to the threat.
Nel said she didn’t notice anything during the flight until they were close to arriving in Sydney.
“There was a slight movement near the cabin, I would say probably 15 minutes before landing. I thought, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of activity up there,’ but that was it.”
She said she herself had not seen the note and that “hopefully, it was just a ruse and someone playing goat and causing such a disturbance.”
The Wellington woman, who was heading to Australia to join her husband and daughter, said the pilot spoke over the intercom as the plane stopped in Sydney.
A passenger on the Air New Zealand flight (pictured) that suffered a bomb threat at Sydney Airport on Saturday night has revealed a new theory about what caused it.
“He said… there’s a little problem, there’s a security problem and they’ve told us to stay where we are.”
Initially, passengers thought it might have had something to do with King Charles’ arrival hours earlier, and they didn’t think it had to do with their plane.
But after an hour on the ground, the person sitting next to Nel showed her a news report on his phone about a bomb threat and said it concerned her flight.
He said that when word spread on the plane, one of the passengers became “very agitated and scared.”
“He was talking a lot and it took some of the cabin crew, who were excellent, to calm him down and get him to tone it down, because he was obviously causing anxiety among the rest of the passengers,” she said.
Nel said people then thought: ‘Why don’t they let us get off the plane if there’s a bomb?’ I think everyone was thinking that.’
Shortly after, she and others on board noticed all the police cars, ambulances and people in reflective vests in the vicinity of the plane.
“I think it all started to become quite real at that point,” he said.
Despite the traumatic situation, he said some people on the plane managed to make some jokes and be pragmatic about what was happening.
The cabin crew and pilot kept them updated at regular intervals.
When they were finally allowed to get off the plane, passengers had to line up with their suitcases in a room while a sniffer dog searched them all.
Up to 40 emergency teams, including heavily armed officers (pictured), responded to the threat.
Additionally, a police officer took each passenger aside and questioned them.
Then it was another hour until her luggage arrived at the carousel, “so it must have gone through some kind of check too, I imagine,” Mrs Nel said.
He said the police officers who spoke to the passengers did so out of support.
‘They weren’t intimidating. Very polite…they couldn’t have been more professional…we really felt very safe that they were there,” Mrs Nel told the radio station.
Speaking on Saturday night after the scare, he said he didn’t think he would get much sleep.
“I’m feeling a little nervous… the adrenaline is still flowing.”
Daily Mail Australia has contacted Air New Zealand and Sydney Airport for comment on whether a note was found on the plane.
