Miscues Mar Hijack Alert

Several federal agencies knew for at least four hours Monday that a Singapore Airlines flight heading to Los Angeles International Airport was transmitting a computerized hijacking alert, yet they failed to notify local law enforcement about the problem, officials said.

The flight, with 126 passengers and 18 crew members, landed safely at the airport at 5:21 p.m. The alert turned out to have been a false alarm that was triggered when a pilot inadvertently hit a button that sent a hijacking code to a Federal Aviation Administration air traffic control center in Oakland.

Security officials and administrators at the airport said Tuesday that they had not learned about the hijacking transmission until 4:48 p.m., although the FAA control tower in Oakland had received the first alert about 12:30 p.m.

Unsure whether the alarm was legitimate, the agencies scrambled to get police, as well as bomb-sniffing dogs and other resources, to a remote gate near the sand dunes where the plane had been taken after landing. Minutes after the jet arrived, helmeted airport police carrying assault rifles boarded and searched it. FBI agents also boarded the plane and questioned the pilots.

The communications breakdown prompted a 2 1/2-hour, closed-door meeting among local security and airport officials to determine what had gone wrong.

“In light of the information that we’ve obtained in the last 24 hours, we are somewhat concerned over the way this was handled by different agencies in the federal government,” said Michael DiGirolamo, a deputy executive director at the city agency that operates the airport. “Because by the time that word got to us, we thought it was a real situation and we moved on that.”

The situation illustrates the jurisdictional complexities that involve security at the world’s fifth-busiest airport, where at least half a dozen agencies list protecting passengers and aircraft as part of their missions.

Local law enforcement officials said they were satisfied with their response to the Singapore Airlines incident on the ground, where officials determined within minutes that a hijacking had not occurred.

They added, however, that an earlier warning would have been beneficial so more resources could have been dispatched to the scene.

But local law enforcement officials raised many questions about how security officials elsewhere had handled the incident.

The FAA said it followed a communications protocol established shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that required it to immediately route information about possible hijackings to the Transportation Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security and the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

The transportation security agency is charged with determining whether the FBI should be called in to respond to an aircraft incident and is supposed to notify local airport officials, said Greg Martin, a FAA spokesman. TSA officials said Tuesday that they could not immediately outline how they had responded to the flight.

Martin said the FAA first got word of a problem at 12:30 p.m. “Our Oakland center picked up the hijack code and within mere minutes of that -- no more than five minutes -- we activated the incident network,” he said.

Those agencies contacted the pilot, who said he had accidentally transmitted the alarm.

“Relatively quickly it was determined that this was a false alarm,” Martin said. “From time to time the [hijack] code is inadvertently squawked, and we have well-established procedures in place on how to ascertain whether it’s a false alarm.”

Even so, the FAA decided as an “extra added precaution” to take the plane off its normal route and send it several miles out to sea. It was shadowed by two F-16 fighter jets, said Maj. Maria Quon, a NORAD spokeswoman.

As Flight 20 neared the airport, the hijack code -- “HIJK” -- was picked up by the FAA control center in Palmdale. This was the first indication to local officials of a problem, they said.

“It’s not something you ever want to see,” said Mike Foote, an air traffic controller at the airport.

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Times staff writers Greg Krikorian and William Wan contributed to this report.