Plane crash photos panic air passengers

A FLIGHT was delayed yesterday after passengers received images of plane crashes on their phones as they waited to take off from Israel.

The captain aborted the flight to Turkey and returned to the terminal at Ben Gurion airport after one passenger had a panic attack and another fainted when the pictures appeared on their phones.

A spokesman for the Israel Airports Authority (IAA) said the photos appeared to have been sent to devices using the Airdrop function on the Apple iphone and it was not a cyber attack.

Pictures sent to some travellers on the Anadolujet flight, a subsidiary of Turkish Airlines, included the wreckage of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 from South Korea, which crashed as it landed in San Francisco, killing three people and injuring nearly 200 in 2013.

Another showed a 2009 Turkish Airline flight to the Netherlands, which broke up on landing killing nine people.

All 160 travellers were taken off the plane and reinspected by security teams, resulting in the passengers suspected of sending out the photos being removed from the flight.

The Boeing 737 was reloaded with luggage and cleared for take-off later in the day after it was declared safe to continue with the flight, according to a statement from the IAA.