By Krystal Smalley
ksmalley@wbcowqel.com
A routine flight turned into a nightmare for Crystle Taylor Stephenson earlier this week.
Stephenson, who lives in Bucyrus and works at Brookdale of Mansfield, booked a seat on Flight 651 through Southwest Airlines and flew from Columbus to Nashville for company training on July 7. It had been a fairly typical flight with a little bit of turbulence and passengers began to retrieve their carry-ons once the plane had landed. Things quickly took a hair-raising turn from there.
Stephenson said a flight attendant told everyone to sit down immediately and assured the passengers it was not to inconvenience them.
“It was just dead silence,” Stephenson said during a phone interview Thursday morning. She was still in Nashville for training. “What was minutes felt like hours.”
After airport security boarded the plane and met with the pilots, it was revealed that while in the air they had received a computer-generated message that a bomb was on the plane. The pilot said he was left with the option to fly to a remote location to protect the public or to fly into Nashville. The airline had received bomb threats over the last two weeks but that Tuesday flight was the first threat to a specific plane.
The passengers, who had been sitting in the plane on the tarmac for 20 minutes, were allowed to gather their carry-ons, disembark the plane, and pick up their luggage. During that time, Stephenson said, she never saw searches done inside or underneath the plane.
“That is what angers me so much,” Stephenson said. “They just sat there and explained everything to us. There were not sure it was credible or not – we still sat there.”
Not once did Stephenson see a change in protocol. She said there was no interrogations, no luggage searches, and not pat downs.
Another executive director Stephenson was traveling with said he was never searched at the Columbus airport, either. He was told that they sometimes randomly skip searches.
“It was very scary,” she said. “It scared me to death.”
Stephenson has had time to process everything that happened earlier this week and there is one fact that has bothered her since that time: there was no follow-up to the incident.
“My concern is that the airline industry has become so desensitized to bomb threats that they are not doing everything possible to keep the safety of their passengers their number one priority – 100 percent of the time,” Stephenson said in a text message. “If their protocol is to keep people in a plane that could have a bomb on it for an extended period of time after landing, then they really need to take a closer look at their emergency plan protocols.”
Stephenson added she was shocked that airport security did not evacuate the passengers immediately through the emergency doors.
“Isn’t that what they are for?” she asked.
As of Thursday, Stephenson said there had not been any follow-up from the airline if the threat was credible or not.