Comment Re:what was the point of turning around (Score 1) 121
Aborting is standard practice for such things for multiple reasons:
1. Regulatory / legal: Dealing with potential problem people in a source country is preferable to just telling the destination country: "Yo bruh we're bringing a terrorist over, can you pick him up so that we can go through a lengthy extradition process to get him back?"
2. Opsec: The "bomb" hadn't exploded yet. You don't know why it hadn't exploded. Maybe it was timer based. Maybe it was GPS coordinate based. Maybe the target was the airport at Palma de Mallorca. Maybe it's not designed to go off but to be smuggled into the destination country. All we know was the target wasn't New Jersey.
3. Liability: A united plane dealing with an American airport in America with passengers in American jurisdiction makes for less legal headaches than unloading passengers in a foreign country straight into the hands of police.