Fat fingers may have caused German hijack alert at Nuremberg Airport

A cockpit keyboard error may have triggered a hijack alert at Germany's Nuremberg Airport, a police spokesman told dpa on Wednesday.

According to initial investigations, the pilot intended to report a radio failure on Tuesday but accidentally entered the code for an aircraft hijacking, the spokesman said. Instead of transmitting the code for a radio failure, the aircraft's transponder sent the number 7500, the signal indicating a hijacking.

The alert prompted a major response in Nuremberg that drew in a negotiation team trained to communicate with hijackers and the Special Support Command (USK) of the Bavarian police.

Military aircraft began escorting the plane while it was in Croatian airspace. Austrian jets of the Austrian Armed Forces were also alerted. Once the aircraft entered German airspace, two Eurofighter jets from Tactical Air Wing 74 escorted it all the way to Nuremberg.

Police said on Wednesday that the Boeing 737-800's radio was also defective. As a result, the crew could no longer be contacted after the plane took off from the Greek island of Corfu.

The pilot was probably unaware of the error, police spokesman Michael Petzold said. Once transmitted, a code cannot be withdrawn. Police are not investigating the pilot, as he is believed to have acted unintentionally.

Emergency responders had less than an hour between the distress signal and the landing to react, Petzold said. "It was an exceptionally outstanding performance," he said, adding that police had been prepared for the worst-case scenario in a very short time.