A bomb threat note was found Wednesday on a cross-country United Airlines flight, forcing the plane to divert to Chicago O’Hare International Airport.
United Airlines Flight 1533 left Newark Liberty International Airport at around 6:40 a.m., according to flight tracking website FlightAware.
During the flight, an unnamed passenger wrote a bomb threat on a bathroom mirror, which was discovered about two hours into the flight for Los Angeles International Airport.
Passengers were not given details about the cause for the diversion until the plane had landed.
“I … looked up and saw everybody else in the cabin looking around, trying to figure out what was going on. And nobody said a word … like 10 or 15 minutes later we start to, like, feel it in our ears like we can tell we’re descending,” passenger Richard Flicking, who got a notification about the diversion to Chicago on a smart watch, told WBBM-TV.
The plane made an emergency landing at around 7:40 a.m. local time, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
Passengers were deplaned away from the airport. There were a total of 202 travelers and nine crew on board the Boeing 787 plane, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
“We are being held on buses away from the plane about a mile away from the main O’hare airport. They are going to go through everyone’s bags,” passenger Rashad Robinson wrote in a post on X.
The plane was searched by a bomb-sniffing dog, which found a suspicious package. When technicians could not open it, a robot was used.
The passenger associated with the bag was taken for police questioning, police told WBBM-TV.
The package did not explode, and it is not clear why the dog thought it was suspicious, FBI spokesperson Siobhan Johnson told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Flight 1533 resumed and headed towards Los Angeles on a new plane later Wednesday afternoon, an airline spokesperson told KTLA-TV.
On Tuesday, an American Airlines flight to O’Hare was diverted back to Albuquerque after a passenger tried to open the emergency exit door.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.