AA Flight Panic "Ought to be commended and encouraged"? · Thursday July 12, 2007
From Bloomberg (all emphasis mine):
Crew members informed the pilot of Flight 136, a Boeing Co. 777 en route to London’s Heathrow Airport, about a male passenger who had been seen on a shuttle bus from Los Angeles International Airport’s employee parking lot, Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said in a phone interview this morning.
“This is the type of vigilance that ought to be commended and encouraged,’‘ he said.
Suspicious guy spotted and dealt with. Good job. Oh, but wait:
The issue has been resolved, Knocke said. The Transportation Security Administration said in a statement this afternoon that the man was a regular passenger with a verified boarding pass who had gone through standard security screening. He didn’t use an employee bus, the agency said.
After the flight left Los Angeles, according to American Airlines spokesman Tim Smith, a flight attendant saw a passenger she believed she had seen earlier on a bus used to bring airline employees from a parking lot to the airport.
“We have what, essentially, sounds like a case of mistaken identity,’‘ Smith said in a phone interview.
and
The flight attendant questioned the passenger during the flight, and “ultimately she conveyed her concerns to the pilot,’‘ Smith said.
Here are my questions:
- Let’s give the flight attendant the benefit of the doubt, that she honestly thought this was the same suspicious person she saw on the employee shuttle. Why didn’t she mention him to anyone until he was on her plane and the plane was in the air?
- Perhaps her questioning consisted of asking him if he was an employee, and his negative response was what made her suspicious. In that case, wouldn’t checking his identification against the flight manifest have been sufficient?
- If they didn’t want to check his identification because it might “set off” the suspected terrorist, why weren’t they equally concerned that their teenager-on-the-make excuse of “running out of fuel” right after questioning him would show their hand? If they did consider both hazards, why not go with the less drastic option first?
And finally, let’s assume all of those questions are somehow adequately answered. That still leaves the biggest question of all: Why would you divert a flight with a suspected terrorist on it to the most populous city in the United States?
— Rod Knowlton
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