Airplane bathroom sex blamed for terror alert

With security officials on edge for the tenth anniversary of 2001's World Trade Center attack, even something as trivial as passengers spending too much time in an airplane bathroom proved sufficient to cause fighter jets to be scrambled and bomb squads called in.

ABC News reported on Sunday that there had been two separate incidents, one involving an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles to New York's JFK Airport and the other involving a Frontier Airlines flight from Denver to Detroit.

The first situation was resolved even before the plane landed, when the passengers in question complied with directions from federal air marshalls. The second was a little trickier, and that plane was taken to a remote area of the airport to be searched for explosives.

According to law enforcement sources cited by ABC, however, the "suspicious behavior" in that case turned out to be two people "making out" in the bathroom.

The local ABC affiliate in Detroit, WXYZ, was a bit more explicit in its language, noting that "the ABC News National Security team is telling Action News that their sources say the flight was disrupted by two people having intimate relations in one of the bathrooms."

An FBI statement on the incident, however, mentions neither "making out" nor "intimate relations." It says simply, "Out of an abundance of caution, NORAD scrambled F-16 jets to shadow the flight until it landed safely at DTW at approximately 3:30 PM EDT. Law enforcement met the flight, which was brought to a remote area of the airport. The plane was swept with negative findings and cleared at 5:15 PM ET."

Is "abundance of caution" the latest catch-phrase for safe sex?

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.