Newport Beach : Jetliner Leaving Airport Delayed by Bomb Threat

A PSA jetliner with 99 passengers aboard was evacuated and searched at John Wayne Airport on Tuesday after the airline received a bomb threat that later proved to be a hoax.

Flight 689, bound for San Francisco, was already taxiing toward the runway at 1:11 p.m. when the telephone threat came in to PSA’s San Diego reservations desk, said Orange County Sheriff’s Lt. Wyatt Hart, security chief at the airport.

Airline officials telephoned their Orange County office and the control tower at John Wayne, and both radioed warnings to the aircraft. The pilot had not yet reached the runway and taxied instead to the south end of the airport, where the passengers were evacuated, Hart said.

Within a half-hour, passengers were shuttled by bus back to the terminal and the sheriff’s bomb squad searched the aircraft and luggage, but found no evidence of a bomb. Passengers were allowed to re-board the plane at 3:20 p.m., and the flight resumed without incident.

PSA spokesmen said they would have no comment on the incident because it is their policy not to discuss bomb hoaxes.

Passengers expressed irritation at the delay, however, and some were concerned with what they said were inadequate security measures.

“I’m mad as can be about this,” said Jean Erickson of San Francisco, who was on the flight with her 2 1/2-year-old daughter.

“They had us out there in the heat for half an hour, and we weren’t any more than 50 or 100 feet from the airplane. If the damn thing would have blown, we would all have been blown up anyway. They didn’t have a barrier out there; they didn’t have anything,” Erickson said. Hart said passengers were kept at least 250 to 300 feet away from the aircraft, well clear of any potential blast.

“I think they were a safe distance from the aircraft,” he said in response to Erickson’s comments. “If she didn’t feel like she was a safe distance, there wasn’t anything keeping her there.”