One Comic-Con fan had her arrival to San Diego delayed, but her trip to the finest city was an adventure in itself.
“It was crazy,” Yesenia Cisneros, who left Seattle on Saturday morning at 7 a.m., said. “I was just trying to run through my mind what it could be….That was my first thing that there was some kind of security threat.”
Cisneros said she woke up from a nap about an hour or an hour and a half into her flight to the pilot saying they were starting to descend, but she noticed the landscape below looked a lot more like the Pacific Northwest than San Diego.
“As we’re landing at the tarmac there’s a bunch of fire trucks and police stationed there and they just had us wait,” she said. “The police came and escorted us out of the plane and we had to leave all of our belongings there so they could come check the luggage and check out the plane.”
Cisneros and the other 57 passengers were taken onto a bus on the tarmac of the Portland airport where they waited for nearly three hours, Cisneros said.
“They only told us that it was a security threat… they were concerned and they had to…look at the plane completely and look at the luggage,” she told NBC 7.
She said it was the waiting that got to her because they were taken onto the bus with no information, and waited for hours while the canine unit and the bomb squad sniffed the luggage on the plane.
Local
“It’s always a…risk,” Cisneros said. “You don’t know if it’s someone just calling in because they think it’s funny…or if it’s a real threat. So I think everything has to be taken as…it’s real.”
Cisneros said she wasn’t scared during the delay because the crew and the authorities made her feel safe. “They kept everyone calm...It felt really good,” she said.
The passengers were rescreened and eventually the flight landed in San Diego, about five hours behind schedule.
Investigators are not saying if anything was found. Two runways were shutdown while the flight was grounded.
Although she still doesn’t know what specifically caused the plane to be diverted, she said she’s putting it behind her. “I’m just going to enjoy Comic-Con on my last day,” Cisneros said.
The FBI is now handling the case, according to the Portland airport.
