Looking back at 2024: Skyrocketing hoax bomb threats strike schools, hospitals, flights and more-OxBig News Network

Students leaving a private school that received a bomb threat in Erode
| Photo Credit: Govarthan M

As of December 14, 2024, fake bomb threats were sent to around 977 places just this year alone. To put this figure in context, a total of 330 places received bomb threats between 2018 to 2023.

This figure does not include threats sent to flights. If we add these numbers, the figure increases significantly. The Ministry of Civil Aviation said 999 hoax bomb threats were sent to airlines, and around 666 were sent just in October. We were able to verify threats to 416 flights. Assuming this figure was 999 as per the government, the total number of entities threatened would surge to around 2,000.

Bulk emailing threats

One reason for the sharp increase this year is the recent trend of sending bomb threats in bulk to over 100 entities in a single batch on the same day. For instance, in May, around 200 schools received similar bomb threat mails in the Delhi-NCR region, prompting evacuations and police action.

Threats targeting such a high number of schools in a single batch have not been seen in previous years. The maximum number of such simultaneous emails sent to schools was 70 in December last year in Bengaluru. Before that, 16 schools were sent bomb threat mails in 2022 in the same city, and 16 for unspecified locations in Chennai.

Accordingly, several establishments received bomb threats through mail, as opposed to just a small fraction through calls, notes or other methods.

Since these bulk emails targeted schools the most, the number of threats sent to schools is the highest. Most times, bomb threats are sent through emails. This is true for all kinds of establishments, and not only schools. Of the 658 times schools received bomb threats, only one was received through a hoax call and the rest were through emails. Emails sent on VPN connections proved hard to track.

The distribution of threats is also skewed, with threats targeting the most places in Delhi. Besides schools, government offices like that of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Reserve Bank of India, the Delhi High Court, the Northern Railways’ CPRO office and the Tihar jail were targeted in Delhi.

A costly affair

Such hoaxes are time-consuming and expensive to resolve, especially for airlines. When a flight is forced to abort its journey soon after take-off, it has to drain part of its fuel to reduce its weight to the maximum allowed landing weight. In a normal journey, the difference between the flight’s take-off weight and the maximum allowed landing weight is bridged when the aircraft burns fuel during the flight. However, since the flight is forced to cut short its journey, the fuel is released in the air, causing expensive wastage.

Fuel dumping or fuel burning might be necessary with larger aircraft meant for long-haul operations. While most major airlines do not have long-haul flights, Air India does have Boeing long-haul flights in its fleet, according to planespotters.

The difference between the maximum take-off weight and maximum landing weight can be used as an indicator to gauge how much fuel must be spent or dumped before the flight can commence landing. The table below shows this value for some Boeing long-haulers.

Following the high number of bomb threats, the procedure for determining the severity of threats was adjusted to ensure more efficient functioning by Bomb Threat Assessment Committees in different airports. Additionally, the Aircraft (Security) Rules, 2023 was amended in December to fix a fine amount of 1 crore rupees for those who sent hoax threats.