Three European countries scrambled fighters to intercept a Spanish airliner that flew for hundreds of kilometres without responding to control tower messages, raising the fear that it had been hijacked, airline sources confirmed on Wednesday.
As the Boeing 737 flew 186 passengers from Bergen in Norway to the Spanish holiday island of Majorca, the Danish, French, German and Dutch air forces were put on alert for a potential suicide mission similar to the September 11 attacks in the United States.
Germany, the Netherlands and France scrambled fighters in fear of an attack on Brussels or Paris to mark the first day of the EU’s enlargement, the Spanish paper El PaÃÂs reported on Wednesday on the basis of on official documents from the Netherlands.
The scare on May 1 ended when the chief cabin attendant in the airliner looked out of a window and saw two French fighters.
She told the pilots, who radioed the fighter pilots and assured them that the airliner had not been hijacked.
The airline pilots, named as Alberto Fernández and Enrique MartÃÂn, failed to respond to calls from a control tower in Denmark shortly after leaving Norwegian air space.
The air traffic controllers alerted the defence forces, who passed on the warning to Germany, since the plane had then entered German air space.
Two German F-4 fighters were scrambled as the plane failed to reply to Dutch air traffic controllers in Limburg.
The Boeing was called on normal and emergency channels, Dutch investigators in Haarlem said in the report quoted by El PaÃÂs.
Two Dutch F-16s were sent up when Eurocontrol, which is responsible for airspace over Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and part of Germany, also received no reply.
As the plane approached Brussels the two French fighters appeared and their pilots spent 10 minutes trying to raise the airliner, using three separate frequencies.
The airline pilots told the Dutch police that their radio was on and they had not found the 20 minutes of radio silence strange, El PaÃÂs reported.
They considered the flight to have been ”normal and routine” and said they had at no time carried out sudden manoeuvres which might make the fighters suspicious.
Air Europa said on Wednesday that it had investigated the incident and concluded that nothing strange had happened.
Its spokesperson claimed that Eurocontrol had dealt with 20 other ”alarm situations” in the first 10 days of May, but she was not aware of fighters being scrambled in any other case.
She offered no explanation as to why the pilots might not have heard the air traffic controllers and failed to detect the French fighters. – Guardian Unlimited Â