A US flight made an emergency landing at New York’s La Guardia Airport on Sunday after a passenger mistook a fellow traveller’s vintage camera he was adjusting for a bomb.
A female passenger on American Airlines Flight 4817 from Indianapolis to New York had seen a man looking through pictures of vintage camera on websites during a flight and thought he was looking at bomb-making instructions, the New York Daily News reported.
When the man took out his own camera to make adjustments, she thought he was setting a timer on a detonator, reports said.
The flight landed at La Guardia at 3pm local time and the passenger was detained for several hours before being released without charge.
Los Angeles TV news channel ABC7 said there were several injuries when confused passengers rushed to leave the plane.
“Some people were yelling, ‘bomb.’ Some people were yelling, ‘fire.’ It’s very unclear what’s happening. Most people were just saying, ‘Run. Go,'” passenger Abigal Kunkle, was quoted by ABC7.
The male passenger had two checked bags and security officials found a skateboard and several vintage camera in them when they were searched.
“The JTTF [Joint Terrorism Task Force], the FBI, and the Port Authority Police Department determined that there was no criminality on the part of the passenger and he was released,” a New York Port Authority spokesman said.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
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Karens. There will always be Karens.
The word you were looking for is “morons”.
This is not what “Karen” means.
Sadly, it does not surprise me that she did not know what a real camera looks like.