Art: In Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, Kumar lights up in airplane bathroom and is handcuffed by federal air marshals. Harold and Kumar are deported to a foreign country (Cuba).
Life: Qatari diplomat lights up in airplane bathroom and is handcuffed by federal air marshals (full story). The young diplomat is deported to a foreign country (Qatar).
I did a quick search on Google News, but could not find any journalist who noticed the parallel.
Do you know why “fighter jets were scrambled” in a situation like this? In a movie it makes for good action, but I just don’t see in what scenario someone actually thinks it helps. Are the fighter jets there to track the plane in case it tries to somehow duck radar? To exchange sign language with passengers? To shoot the plane down? (If that last option, under what possible situation, save aimed directly at the White House and closing fast?) None of these seem plausible uses, so I’m wondering what I must be missing.
Fighter jets also offer intimidation. A hijacker might think twice about his objective with a fighter out the window. Also, a visual inspection of the cockpit lets the fighter pilot determine who is in control of the plane (such as in the Payne Stewart case). Its much easier to make critical decisions with an on-site observer verse trusting the radio report.
OT:
Philip,
when there is more information, I would be very interested in your assessment of the Polish flight crash that killed many of that country’s leaders recently. What a terrible tragedy…
Thanks Chuck. Fighter pilots regularly carry photos of all commercial flight crew, and can get close enough to the cockpit to ascertain whether the person at the controls matches the photo?
The intimidation thing makes no sense to me… intimidate how? It’s pretty binary… shoot down or don’t shoot down. Maybe there’s some way to fire a few across the bow at 500 knots, but anyone knows that a fighter should have little problem dispatching a 747, so little information is communicated by that gesture. (But then, those who might hijack a plane aren’t always making much sense, so maybe there’s some advantage to fighting fire with fire, so to speak.)
It still seems to me like much of the “security” related to air travel… small people making big decisions, and policy that emphasizes form over function. Sigh.
(Sorry if I’m being a bit touchy… just got my tickets for a transpacific flight, and am not looking forward to putting my liquids into 1oz packages held in 1qt clear baggies.)
Zapiens: Regarding the Polish plane crash, it will be hard for me to say anything intelligent because there isn’t usually good information on public Web sites about foreign airports. So I’m not sure what kind of instrument approaches were available for the runway, for example, and therefore how challenging a flight it might have been. The news reports talked about “fog” on the runway, which generally means that it is impossible to land any but the most advanced airplanes (e.g., Airbus) with the best maintenance at the best airports, e.g., Heathrow.
There has been a phenomenon where the more important the passengers the more pressure that pilots feel to complete a trip as planned. This kind of pressure is almost always bad for safety.
Hmmm.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Polish_Air_Force_Tu-154_crash is pretty informative. The airport does not have an instrument landing system, which means the pilots must do more than follow an electronic glideslope down. The instrument approach would be “non-precision” and these are much more demanding as well as not as useful since one needs better weather to complete the approach legally and safely. Without an ILS the runway probably lacked approach lighting, which are super bright lights that extend for about 1/2 mile in front of the runway. These make life much easier in the fog.
As reported by the media, the operation that they conducted would have been illegal for a U.S. scheduled or charter airline. If the reported weather at an airport is worse than the minimum required for an approach, the pilots cannot commence the approach. They must hold and wait for better weather or divert to an alternate. For example, at Hanscom Field (KBED), the ILS 29 requires 1/2 mile of visibility. If a charter crew were outside the final approach fix and the Tower called to say “visibility 1/4 mile in fog”, the crew would not be able to continue descending towards the ground.
The really troubling part of the Wikipedia report is that the crew crashed on attempt #4 to land. Usually pilots are pretty fatigued after a couple of failed approaches and it is time to go somewhere less challenging.
This accident was presumably mostly due to poor pilot judgment, but it also underscores the cost of the lack of innovation in airliner avionics. Regulations and small numbers of airframes make it prohibitively expensive to put “synthetic terrain” into airliners (little four-seat airplanes have only gotten these in the last couple of years). With a Microsoft Flight Simulator-style view of the world, the pilots of this airplane would have seen the ground, the hills, the runway, etc., all on an LCD screen in front of them. Instead they were relying on essentially World War II-era tools for determining their location relative to obstacles and the ground.