14 DAY TRIAL // Making everything work so easily is a double-edged sword for Apple, as its devices can sometimes cause blunders that may not otherwise happen if an extra verification step was included.
This is the case of AirDrop, which was the sharing feature that was mistakenly used by a 15-year-old girl to send a fake crime scene photo to all iPhones on board of Hawaiian Airlines flight 23 taking off from Oakland for Maui.
The girl, who studies medical-biology, was trying to share a photo of her latest class with her mother, also an iPhone user. When AirDropping the image, however, the girl couldn’t find her mother’s iPhone in the list of devices, but instead, 15 other iPhones which had the feature turned on.
So she tapped each and every one of them, reportedly sending the file across the plan. If you wonder what was so frightening about the photo, scroll down to the end of the article to see it. The picture shows a child mannequin on the ground, and needless to say, it was only a matter of time until people started thinking about a possible terrorist threat.
Not the single incident
The passengers who received the photo alerted the flight crew, who instead notified the pilot about it. The plane was already taxiing and preparing for takeoff, when the pilot decided to go back to the gate for an investigation.
“Obviously, it inconvenienced some folks. All in all everybody did everything right... The passengers did the right thing by alerting the flight crew, and the flight crew did the right thing by trying to figure out if there was a valid threat or not,” Alameda County Sgt. Ray Kelly told BuzzFeed News.
The plane took off after a 90-minute delay, but without the girl and her mother who were rebooked for a flight the next day.
However, they should consider themselves lucky they didn’t go on the plan, as a pepper spray bottle went off in the middle of the fight, making everyone cough and causing respiratory issues.
Passengers were panicked, and the pilot decided to send them all to the back of the plan until the air cleared. The aircraft eventually landed in Maui, and 12 people and 3 flight attendants needed medical care.
