frightening flight experience
 

Not sure if this has been discussed yet, but a co-worker shared this link with me. Absolutely terrifying story, if it is true. It makes you wonder the state of the willingness of our country's citizens to go above and beyond in the event of scare like this.

http://www.womenswallstreet.com/WWS/...&articleid=711

And then her follow up:

http://www.womenswallstreet.com/WWS/...&articleid=716

Apologies if this has already gone around. I realize it's about a week old.

Fourth thread on the page man... but we did not have the followup. Reading now.

OK the followup confirms some details, but the more striking part of it is the quotes from people connected to the airlines, such as:

Oof.

Yeah, I notice that's what another pilot said - that these incidents (dry runs) were common and the topic of much industry gossip. Why are they not being reported? Public awareness is likely the best deterrent (though not always the most rational or logical - instead I imagine it would create quite a state of panic).

I still don't see the usefulness of the dry runs unless they're to create terror in and of themselves. The dry runs tip off the Feds to other kinds of attacks and "waste" personel. It really looks more like a test of the aircrews. Either way it is scarey stuff.

Seems Capt. Peck is more worried about noncitizens rights(feelings) than airline safety. Wrong priorities, methinks. :eyebrow:

Whatever happened to "presumed innocent till proven guilty"? Or does that only apply to Christians?
-Pie

"The incident you wrote about, and incidents like it, occur more than you like to think. It is a 'dirty little secret' that all of us, as crew members, have known about for quite some time."

I tend to think this quote is taken a bit out of context. In its current place, the editor makes it sound like the airlines are hiding some deep secret of ongoing terrorist plots that they can legally do nothing about. I'm sure a lot of incidents like this happen in which suspcisious activity causes flight delays,
like people shaving in the restroom or people getting sick who don't speak English, but I doubt any of them are real security risks. Do airlines get probed? I'm sure they did, but I noticed that we never learned much about the original 19 hijackers and their practice attempts, so as the public, we don't quite know how it works, anyways.

I would love to know what the actual events were on that flight and the findings of the authorities. This person's perception of it makes it sound absolutely horrific and, if that is the way it all went down, I would have been scared shitless and very concerned for my life. So how come no one else on the flight has mentioned anything? How come this hasn't hit the media? Why didn't this make the same news the way the previous incidents I linked did?

I keep thinking back to a photograph I saw in the Los Angeles Times called "Falling" by Pulitzer Prize winning AP photographer Richard Drew. It's a photograph of a man, his body is stretched out, one knee at a right angle, as if he's lying on a couch, watching television in the living room, relaxing and enjoying life. But he's not. It's a photograph of a man falling from one of the top floors of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. This man jumped to his death, most likely because it seemed a less painful way to die than being engulfed in flames.

This picture is haunting. For a long time I kept it in my office. I still think about this picture and I wonder about this man -- his daily life, what he did for work, what he did for play, what his thoughts were about the world. I think about this person. I think about the meaning of "dry run." And then I think about what it means to be politically correct. And I keep coming up blank.

This is a really bizarre way to end this article and it really bugs me. I can't pinpoint why, but this woman sounds really paranoid to me, even if it is just because she kept this picture in her office, has never been able to get that man's life out of her mind, and blames his tragic death on rampant political correctness in our country. Something about the article, the way its stated, and the heavy political overtones make me question exactly what happened.

"So even if Northwest Airlines searched two of the men on board my Northwest flight, they couldn't search the other 12 because they would have already filled a government-imposed quota."

This is a serious problem, but not one that arises out of rules regarding profiling. A terrorist out of the Middle East can just as easily get a fake passport, shave clean, and walk onto an airline and not ever look as if he needs to be searched nor be flagged by the security system to be checked. The real problem is that there isn't enough money for the security needed to search every person. If each of these people were searched and they really did all have a single component to a weapon, how would searching all of them have helped? Each bag that goes on board an airplane is sniffed with an explosives detector and each carryon bag goes through a scanner that detects oganic material (explosives). What would have helped, here? Removing political correctness and searching each person with an Arab name?

So she asked me some of the questions that she had wanted to ask him: Where exactly did this band of 14 musicians play? What was the name of the band? Who booked the band and what kind of music did they play? Did anyone follow up and actually witness these 14 men performing at their desert casino gig?

I don't think this is any of her business and here is the reason why:

I asked a friend who is a local news correspondent if there were any arrests at LAX that day. There weren't.

Sounds like a lot of nothing to me.

But I wonder, if 19 terrorists can learn to fly airplanes into buildings, couldn't 14 terrorists learn to play instruments?

I love that line.

That pertains to punishment not prevention or investigations.
Considering the laundry list of bombings and hijackings committed by middle eastern men between ages 20 and 40, anyone trying to prevent more would be stupid not to notice, and yes investigate, anyone fitting that profile. It's just common sense to anyone charged with protecting us from these acts. :eyebrow:

Hmmmm. I thought racial profiling was not accepted practice. Well, let's just pack off all the Japanese back to their internment camps...

- Pie

You're right, it's not accepted practice and that's just plain stupid. Every law enforcement professional knows that. Being politically correct is not the best way to prevent the atrocities these people have in mind.
Your internment camp remark is a straw man I won't bother to address. :p

Considering the laundry list of bombings and hijackings committed by middle eastern men between ages 20 and 40

Say we were to concentrate our efforts on Middle Eastern men aged 20-40. How long do you think their efforts to sneak weapons in on themselves is going to last? Do you think they would just keep trying it over and over again, knowing that it is almost a garuntee they will get searched?

Granny and the kids aren't going to get searched, so how long do you think it will be before a Middle Eastern man, aged 20-40, figures out he can sneak the weapon in on his kid? Or how long do you think it will be before the terrorists start using people other than Middle Eastern men? Plenty of Islamic extremists in the Phillipenes and Africa that would love to walk into a plane knowing they aren't going to get searched because the TSA is too busy checking the eight Middle Eastern males who are also boarding.

Random searches = good.
Limiting the scope of your security based on an expected pattern = bad.

Ignoring the most likely perpetrator of a hijacking and/or terrorist act because it might be deemed politically incorrect = Really Fucking Stupid and We Deserve to Die

Ignoring the most likely perpetrator of a hijacking and/or terrorist act because it might be deemed politically incorrect = Really Fucking Stupid and We Deserve to Die

And how do you identify that likely perpetrator? The guy from Saudi Arabia here in the US on a visitor's passport? What about the guy from the Phillipenes here on a work visa? How about the man from Syria with a fake driver's license that has been marked as a US citizen in the flight ticketing system? Remember the British citizen that placed a bomb in his shoe and intended to blow up the plane? He wasn't checked, nor would he have been had we been checking all men from the Middle East aged 20-40.

We have limited TSA security resources. I understand the problem of ignoring the obvious, but concentrating on one group of people simply opens holes everywhere else. How about we make it difficult for anyone to bring a weapon on board?

Kitsune, you make a lot of sense.