I won first prize in a United Airlines contest: a Christmas week in Sacramento (second prize was two weeks in Sacramento). The succession of televised basketball and football games on the television here has been interrupted with news of Mr. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be bomber of a Northwest Airlines Airbus bound from Amsterdam to Detroit. The incident has brought the U.S. government’s “no-fly” list into the news. When Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father dropped a dime on his son and told the Feds that young Umar was preparing to wage jihad, this was not sufficient to add his name to the list (due to fears that many frequent flyers with the same name would be inconvenienced?).
This prompted our host to note that he himself was on the “no-fly” list for four years. Whenever the 65-year-old U.S. Army colonel, with a Top Secret security clearance, showed up at the airport, the Tray Stacking Agency (TSA) would detain him for about an hour to call Washington and make sure that he was not the guy on the list. What were the clues available to TSA? Our colonel is black. The guy in the database was listed as white. Our colonel was 65 years old; the guy in the database was 40. Eventually the young white guy was dropped from the database and our colonel was able to fly commercial with only the usual amount of hassle.
Now if the US would, like my tiny European country, issue ID cards with unique numbers that can be easily checked with a database, there wouldn’t be any of those mixups.
Gee, I thought TSA stood for Theatrical Security Administration. After all, they wear those usher uniforms, and put on a good show, even if nothing is accomplished in the end.
I flew out of Detroit Metro yesterday, and although there was no TSA hassle, I had to stack my own trays. Seriously. So TSA must stand for something else…
New story from Aero-News.net about a four-hour shutdown of a regional airport when a TSA screener became alarmed by a child’s toy: http://www.aero-news.net/index.cfm?ContentBlockID=1704dd07-bd2b-4b92-8cda-70cb215e0604&
I love how in Hollywood movies the FBI, and especially the CIA, are always portrayed as some highly advanced ruthlessly efficient super-powerful government agency, when in reality of course it’s nothing but a huge inefficient beaurocratic boondogle, just like any other government agency.
Fabian: When traveling in a foreign country, e.g., Argentina, and encountering an angry young person who blamed all of his or her country’s problems on the U.S. and specifically the CIA, I would respond “We’ve been trying to get rid of Fidel Castro, who is 90 miles from Florida, for more than 40 years; you think that the same people who couldn’t get rid of Castro have been able to prevent you from going to college, starting a business, and selling your product to the Chinese, Brazilians, Russians, and Indians?”
I’m not looking forward to my flight back to Spain after the holidays. Longer lines, no inflight map, last hour sitting down with nothing in my lap — and I’ve read in a Spanish newspaper online that some flights from the US have disallowed the use of electronics during the entire flight.
The absurdity of it all is astounding (in my opinion). Imagine if each time there were a car accident on the highway, whichever administration is in charge of motor transportation safety immediately jumped in and made life increasingly more difficult.
Yup, ID cards would be just fantastic. Because of course, as everyone knows, they are unforgeable, unalterable, and the governments that issue them are infallible!
Easy solution. For the duration of the flight, just tranquilize passengers as they board the airplane — problem solved!! 🙂
There are a lot of benefits with tranquilization:
1) No worry about bathroom use, You save on cleaning the airplane.
2) No need for food or snack service, or lam entertainment. You save on stacking the airplane with food.
3) And many more (use your imagination).
And with the space saving (no need for toilets, or food storage, or first class, etc.) and since the passengers can now be laid out flat, it’s easy to stack them up like sardines. The down side? This plan will kill the “standing-room-only option” idea that airliners are toying with: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/business/25seats.html
George, I’ve wanted this for a long time on 3+ hr commercial flights. Give me the right drug cocktail for the appropriate duration and stick me horizontal in the overhead bin.
Perhaps excess engine power can be used to generate nitrous oxide for the cabin. There’s plenty of raw material to use at altitude.
Seriously, I’ve asked my doctor to prescribe the appropriate sleeping pills plus melatonin when taking 9hr or longer flights. I arrived refreshed and comfortable, ready for work, instead of sore and cranky. Works well for everyone as long as I’m not in an aisle seat.
Here’s my right-wing reactionist idea of how to secure airlines. Everyone boards in a bathing suit and everyone gets to carry a revolver of their choice loaded with Glaser Safety Slugs or other frangable ammunition. Otherwise, all luggage is checked.
Benefits:
1. No place to store explosives.
2. Incentive for civility.
3. Big incentive for personal fitness.
4. Jihadist Muslims will not fly under those circumstances.
I am starting to feel that the need for safety an the issue of flight anxiety some people feel could be dealt with in one go, by anaesthetising all passengers to full sleep for the duration of a flight. The main issue would be replacing the crew with a smaller one of medically trained staff, but it’d still save money for the airliner. Planes could also be designed to be truly fuel efficient, with no windows at the sides.
This might be discriminatory and insensitive, but what if there were a little station as you go through security where you were offered your choice of: a small bite of bacon, 1/4 shot of vodka or wine, wiping your feet on a mat featuring the portraits of leading terrorist-supporting imams, or submitting to a full-body search. If we aren’t willing to profile and want security measures to be based on “behavior”, aren’t there certain behaviors that fanatical jihadists would not be willing to do?