Officials reviewing response to Air India bomb scare in Iqaluit

Officials at all levels of government are reviewing how Iqaluit International Airport can better handle emergencies following last week's bomb scare.

The 211 passengers on Air India flight 127, travelling from New Delhi to Chicago, were left stranded inside the airport's security zone for 18 hours after a threat made on social media caused the aircraft to make an emergency landing. 

Police ultimately confirmed there were no bombs aboard. 

Passengers ended up being loaded onto a Royal Canadian Air Force aircraft to leave the city.

At the time, Harjit Sajjan, the federal minister of emergency preparedness, said on social media the move was necessary because Air India had not found a solution and Iqaluit "is not equipped to house these passengers." 

There have been previous instances of international flights making emergency landings in Iqaluit, according to John Hawkins, Nunavut's assistant deputy minister of transportation.

"Normally the airline will make arrangements right away to get another aircraft in to accommodate the passengers," he said. "That didn't happen in this case… and it was frustrating." 

He said the Iqaluit airport is able to cater to the volume of passengers on a long-haul flight, like in the Air India case, but anything more than 18 hours is pushing its limits.

"There were a lot of people sleeping on the chairs there. There were people that were using the floor," said Hawkins. "There's a difference between being able to safely accommodate and comfortably accommodate, and we can safely accommodate."

In the future, he said the airport will be "more insistent" on the airline to be responsible for their passengers.

He added it will also work on contingency plans to keep people comfortable for longer stretches of time, like having a stock of emergency beds. 

Nunavut MP Lori Idlout believes the incident has highlighted the resourcing constraints of the airport.

"It's obvious that we don't have enough, and hopefully the federal government realizes that we need to invest more in Nunavut so that we can handle emergency situations such as these," she said. 

Iqaluit airport a 'strategic location'

With a 2.6 kilometre-long runway, the Iqaluit airport can accommodate large planes flying internationally, so the city has a responsibility to do so in an emergency.

"We have, in a way, no choice. We are the only airport within a certain radius that can accommodate this type of aircraft," said Hawkins. 

Mehran Ebrahimi, director of the International Observatory of Aeronautics and Civil Aviation at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), agrees that Iqaluit is a "strategic location" for emergencies.

He said there are three steps in responding to bomb threats: to land the plane as quickly as possible, park it as far away from people as possible, and evacuate the passengers. 

With the Air India emergency landing, he said the Iqaluit airport "was suitable in terms of distance and in terms of minimum time to land." 

The territory doesn't have explosives detection units, so specialized RCMP officers had to be flown in for the incident. 

Ebrahimi believes this is the first bomb threat that Iqaluit's airport has had to deal with. Given the limited resources in the city, he believes having specialists stationed there full-time isn't feasible.

"Is it worth it...equipping the airport with such expertise? Perhaps once every 10 or 15 years, an event of this nature occurs."

Air India has not responded to requests for comment.

In a press conference on Monday, India's Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu vowed to punish those responsible for the hoax threats, including putting perpetrators on a no-fly list.