Armed police swarmed a plane’s baggage hold after mysterious banging was heard at 30,000 ft in the air.
American Airlines Flight AA954 was en route to New York from Buenos Aires on Thursday when the noises were heard.
It returned to the Argentinian capital after 400 miles after the noises sent panic among the passengers.
Armed SWAT teams later stormed and thoroughly search the hold, but no person was found and the cause of the noises remains a mystery.
The delay was so extensive that the flight could not continue and the 243 passengers were put up in hotels overnight.
A replacement flight took off on Friday, it was reported.
In a statement, the airport’s security said: ‘Noises were heard in the cargo hold, enough to give rise to suspicions that there was something unusual.
‘The captain referred to a security problem due to hearing noises.’
Heavily armed cops and sniffer dogs were on standby when the flight returned.
Upon landing, footage filmed by passengers showed a SWAT team armed with firearms and shields entering the hold.
In it, the officers are carried up to the fuselage of the plane on the lift which usually raises up luggage.
Once they reach the top, they charged in while other airport workers are seen nearby.
However, when police got inside the hold found nobody there.
They reported: ‘The hold was opened and the unloading of the luggage containers began, without anything outside the normal parameters being seen at the time.’
A similar incident occurred with a United Airlines flight on New Year’s Day in 2017 when a baggage handler was trapped in the hold for an hour.
The man was stuck in the hold while the plane flew from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Washington Dulles International Airport.
When it touched down on, the man who was an employee of a third-party baggage handler was unharmed.
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