Alert after pilot sent out code for ‘hijack’ by mistake

A PILOT on a Scots flight sparked a military response after mistakenly informing the German army and police that a passenger jet was being hijacked.

The blunder took place on an Aberdeen to Frankfurt flight after the radio in the cockpit failed.

The 100-seater commercial aircraft was in the skies over Germany with 43 passengers on board when the captain noticed that air traffic control (ATC) were not receiving the crew’s messages.

The captain then issued a coded message to controllers on the ground to try and inform them that they were inbound to the German financial centre’s airport, which is the world’s eighth-busiest.

But instead a ‘squawk’ – a coded message – was sent to say that there was a hijacking taking

‘The wrong code was transmitted’

place on board the Embraer E190 aircraft.

The pilot should have sent a code of 7600 – indicating radio failure – via the transponder.

However for an unknown reason he hit 7500 instead – the coded alert for ‘hijack’.

The plane was then put in an holding pattern for 15 minutes until the pilot realised the error and the code was corrected.

Two military jets were mobilised in response to the threat and the German police and army were put on standby.

A spokesman for Lufthansa, Germany’s largest commercial airline, said: ‘The captain issued a squawk in order to inform ATC of the failure.

‘Unfortunately, the wrong squawk code indicating “hijacking” was transmitted to ATC and automatically to federal police/German Federal Armed Forces.

‘After extensive holding, having corrected the code to “communication failure” and receiving respective guidance by ATC, LH975 landed safely in FRA.’

A spokesman for the RAF said: ‘If there was an aircraft that was doing something incorrectly nothing was reported and we did not launch anything.’