Editor's Note

	According to the Xinhua News Agency, five flights were disrupted by hoax calls within 42 days. Experts call for more severe penalties on people who make the hoax calls. More

Incidents Review

Time	Flight	Incident
July 14, 2010	CZ3912	A bomb threat forced a flight from Urumqi in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to make an emergency landing.
April 27, 2012	CA406	Pu, 18, called Shanghai Pudong International Airport on April 27, claiming that he had planted a bomb on an Air China flight and demanding that 1 million yuan ($158,730) be remitted to his bank account. He was sentenced to one year and two months in prison.
August 29, 2012	CA981	An Air China flight, bound for New York, returned to the Beijing Capital International Airport after receiving a threatening message.
August 30, 2012	ZH9706	The plane, bound for Shenzhen from Xiangyang, Hubei Province, was forced to make an emergency landing after receiving a call claiming that explosives would be donated on the flight after its take-off. Police found no dangerous items on board after inspecting the plane. Several days later, Xiong Yi, who made the call, was arrested in Guangdong.
September 9, 2012	JD5168	A man lied that a bomb was on a plane about to take off from Sanya to Guangzhou.
October 8, 2012	CZ680	An international passenger plane, traveling from Istanbul to Beijing via Urumqi, made a forced landing in Gansu Zhongchuan Airport in Gansu's capital of Lanzhou after receiving an anonymous terrorist threat.
October 9, 2012	CA4111	A flight from Lhasa to Beijing via Chengdu, received threat calls before takeoff. And no dangerous items were found on the flight.

Source: Agencies

Viewpoints

Zhang Qihuai, chief expert of the China Aviation Law Service Center

Five flights received threats in about a month. The frequency of the incidents is too high, and also rare in other countries. The people making the threats could have three possible intentions—playing hoax, expressing personal anger, or preventing certain passenger from leaving. The frequent occurrence of threats to flights is due to a lack of knowledge that such behavior amounts to crime, as well as inadequate punishment for such acts. In accordance with the current criminal law, suspects can be detained for only five days and, if proved guilty, sentenced to a short, fixed-term imprisonment. Moreover, the fine is also not enough. Suspects are normally fined by 500 ($79.35) to 2,000 yuan ($317.76), which is far less than the losses of airline companies and passengers resulting from the threats. A few thousand yuan worth of fine is not an effective way to prevent people from making such threats.

Some of China's recent plane-bomb threats have come from people who did not realize the seriousness of their law-breaking, while some other cases have come from those people in some way seeking revenge on society.------Feng Guilin, a researcher with the Hubei Provincial Academy of Social Sciences

The incidents have sparked aviation management authorities into life to strengthen the law publicity and education to make the public aware of the seriousness of hoaxes.

If there were dozens of messages flooding in in one day, the civil aviation system might collapse. In that case, we should further increase our abilities to review information for more accurate and valuable clues, and better, more coordinated emergency responses are also needed in China.------Huang Wenbao, safety manager with the Hubei Airports Group Company

Source: Xinhua

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