Captain Paranoia rules the skies

Hairy Homer

An American mate has sent me this from the Women's Wall Street Journal.

I don't know how credible it is (the Women's Wall St Journal FFS!!) but if it is, here's what old Shakespeare may have said.

'Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.'

Julius Caesar Act II Scene II

Andrew Duffy

The same article was in the Sunday Times. I love how racists always claim not to be racists because they once met a person of another race and thought they were quite nice. If a group of Irish were on a plane to Vegas for a stag do and kept congregating in the aisles and going to the toilet, do you think there'd be an internationally syndicated article written about it?

BrianD

Perhaps a little too much detail to be credible! Anyway, if security is so tight how did all these guys get into the country and congregate on the same flight? If it was a domestic flight you don't even need a passport - kind of obliging of they guys to have them to hand!

Hairy Homer

And there's a follow up

It seems this time that 'political correctness' is now the greatest single threat to America's freedom and worry-free travel.

But what would some popsy know?

[/irony]

ChipZilla

Don't get me started on crap like this.

And the bit in the second article about the need for the trolly dollies "to adequately perform aviation security functions have been delayed and/or ignored."? What security functions are they going to perform? Pour a hot coffee in a "Middle Easterner's" lap? Please.

Borzoi

Funnily enough a similar incident happened to me on a flight from London to Skopje (Macedonia), middle easteners, milling about, knowing each other etc.

As it was pre 9/11 I was merely curious. so I asked one o f the BA flight attendants. The guys were praying, the flight being at one of those tmes when devout muslims are called to prayer - so these guy were doing it as best they could.

It could be the same, it might not, but events do change our perception of things:D

bus77

I knew the goateed-man I had exchanged friendly words with as we boarded the plane was seated only a few rows back, so I thought I would say hello to the man to get some reassurance that everything was fine. As I stood up and turned around, I glanced in his direction and we made eye contact. I threw out my friendliest "remember-me-we-had-a-nice-exchange-just-a-short-time-ago" smile. The man did not smile back. His face did not move. In fact, the cold, defiant look he gave me sent shivers down my spine.

lol, he'd been watching your woman giving his mates dirty looks for the last 2 hours

Flukey

There is always going to be someone going to get paranoid by a thing like that. Some people have little or nothing to do!

robbie1876

Those articles are pure paranoid bs to be honest. The main point of my post here though is to relate to you the tale of what happened to me at the time of September 11th, 2001.

I was in Minnesota at the time, and was due to fly home on September 12th. They closed the airports for 3 or 4 days, and it was 7 days before anyone could fit me onto a flight home. In the end I got a route from Minneapolis to Amsterdam, Heathrow and then on to Dublin.

So I arrived in Minneapolis airport 4 hours before flight time as I had been advised, because of extra security procedures. After I checked in, I went to the security X-ray area and queued to get through it. There was 3 machines for scanning hand luggage, and just one metal detector gate thing to walk through.

A while later, I was sitting at the departure gate waiting for the flight to start boarding. There was quite a lot of middle eastern men also waiting around for the flight, and I was amusing myself by looking at the expressions on the other passengers faces as they realised they were on the same flight as about 50 or so gentlemen with Turbans.

All of a sudden, I realised that when I came through the security check, I had scanned my bag through but didn't walk through the metal detector gate! I thought hard about it for a few minutes, and was positive that after the bag scanned through, I just picked it up and absent-mindedly strolled off towards the departure gates, past the metal detector.

I decided I would go back to security and inform them of this. The lady I talked to was one of the least intelligent people I have ever dealt with. She simply did not understand that I was telling her security had been breached, and they had let me through without making me go through the metal detector.

Eventually, she decided I was causing a scene and called for backup. A big dude came over, and the two of them took me by the arms and marched me through the metal detector, which didn't bleep. They told me to move on and not to cause a scene.

I was bamboozled and didn't know what to do. In the end I did nothing more, just got on the flight and tried not to think about how many more people on the flight (including the 50 or so Middle Easterns) had evaded the security too. I was simply amazed that a week after the 9/11 incident, the security staff were lapse enough to let passengers through security like this. I could have had an AK47 down my trousers, and nobody cared or bothered to check.

Anyway, much like Borzoi, I got slightly worried when they huddled together for the call to prayer. Especially knowing how easy security was breached. It wasn't a pleasant flight.

I guess I should have informed the FAA or somebody about what happened, but I was only 99% sure I hadn't gone through the metal detector, and it couldn't be proved either way, so I decided to leave it.

Robbie

Victor

Originally posted by robbie1876
A while later, I was sitting at the departure gate waiting for the flight to start boarding. There was quite a lot of middle eastern men also waiting around for the flight, and I was amusing myself by looking at the expressions on the other passengers faces as they realised they were on the same flight as about 50 or so gentlemen with Turbans.

Isn't it Sihks that wear Turbans?