UAL halts flight and kicks off teen who used AirDrop to share photo of gun to fellow passengers

With Apple’s AirDrop feature, an iPhone user can send photos, videos, documents, and other files to other iPhone units nearby via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Back in 2018, some iPhone users were busy sending sexually explicit images to other random iPhone users riding the New York subway using AirDrop, a process  known as “cyber-flashing.” You might recall that Wall Street Journal tech reporter Joanna Stern was one of many subway-riding iPhone users who received, as she put it, a photo showing some guy’s “junk.”

While these guns do not shoot bullets, they can cause fatalities which made the photograph an implied threat and a serious one at that. Airport spokesman Doug Yakel said that a fellow passenger onboard the aircraft was responsible for sending the image of the airgun. Authorities discovered that a teen passenger on board the plane was behind the scare. San Francisco International Airport officials stopped flight 2167 from taking off, escorted all of the passengers off of the airplane to be re-screened, and inspected the aircraft for a second time.

The airgun does look like a real gun, enough for law enforcement and aviation officials to be concerned about a possible motive. The photo at the top of this story shows a real weapon at the top with the airsoft airgun seen at the bottom of the photo.