A bomb threat delivered by telephone kept a TAP flight on the tarmac at Faro airport this morning as 38 passengers and 6 crew members were caught up in an Orange Alert.
This alert level is the second most serious a scale of three, put into action after the anonymous caller said there was a bomb on board to 6.05 flight to Lisbon.
The security services were on the scene in double time and by 9.00am had declared the call a hoax. The passenger left on a later flight at 11.00am.
The threat was made in Portuguese.
The 38 passengers and six crew members that swiftly abandoned the aeroplane were transported back to the terminal to wait for news, taking off nearly four hours late.
The flight was the early TAP service to Lisbon and should have taken off at 6.05am.
The authorities went into overdrive with the Bomb Squad, ambulance crews and GNR soon on the scene but the disruption to the normal running of the airport was close to zero whiloe the specialist team swept the TAP flight for explosives.
Operations at the airport are running smoothly and there were no cancellations or delays to flights other than TAP one.
