The busiest travel day in America has come and gone, was it really that bad?! After all the hype and hubbub, I figured we could all used a nice zen picture of an empty airport and this shot by jrodmanjr was a perfect palate cleanser.
By this time on Thanksgiving Day, you’re either stuffed full of turkey in front of the tv, or putting on your stretchy waistband pants in anticipation of an epic feast. Instead of bitching about airlines and TSA searches, be thankful you’re with loved ones. Be thankful you *can* still travel. Be thankful you have a vacation coming up free of family, traffic, and overeating. Just be thankful for something.
Take a photo of something you’re thankful for on your travels? Upload it to our Flickr pool and we could use it for a future Photo of the Day. Happy Thanksgiving!
The uproar over TSA body scanners and pat-downs has hit every corner of the aviation world, from passengers to pilots. The vocal consensus, at least, is that nobody likes them, even though 64 percent of Americans support the practice and 70 percent don’t expect it to impact their travel. A friend of mine, flying today, tweeted that he made it through security at New York’s JFK airport in a mere nine minutes.
Nonetheless, flight crews have voiced vehement opposition to the scans, with one pilot becoming an overnight celebrity by refusing to submit himself to that or a pat-down. We all have to do it, though, so this has left me to ponder … what’s the big deal?
I’ve been particularly intrigued by the attitude of pilots toward body scanners. At first blush, it struck me as a privileged perspective: the top dogs on the plane felt as though they shouldn’t have to be subjected to the same scrutiny as the rest of us. Patrick Smith, resident pilot at Salon.com, wrote of the recent TSA change over crew scrutiny, in which “airline pilots will no longer be subject to the backscatter body scanners and invasive pat-downs at TSA airport checkpoints”:
For pilots like myself this is good news, though at least for the time being we remain subject to the rest of the checkpoint inspection, including the X-raying of luggage and the metal detector walk-through. Eventually, we are told, the implementation of so-called CrewPASS will allow us to skirt the checkpoint more or less entirely.
He continues:
Not everybody agrees that air crews deserve this special treatment. That’s not an unreasonable point of view, and I don’t disagree with it, necessarily. As security experts like Bruce Schneier point out, if you are going to screen at all, it is important to screen everybody, lest the system become overly complicated and prone to exploitable loopholes.
This made me wonder, what is the risk associated with not screening pilots as intensively? The only scenario that came to mind involved a terrorist incident. As I let my mind race, I constructed a hypothetical situation in which terrorists got on board a plane, took control and asked for demands of some sort – i.e., they wanted more than to cause death and destruction. In this situation, I suspected, counter-terrorist teams, such as 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (1st SFOD-D, also known as “Delta Force”), would be called into play.
My thinking continued: if a pilot hadn’t been scanned, he could have brought a weapon … which could have been taken from him by terrorists. Would the special forces teams want to know if a pilot had been scanned?
As I continued through my hypothetical exercise, I could hear my platoon sergeant’s voice from close to 15 years ago, drilling me from across time: “Actions on the objective,” he used to say, “always spend most of your time rehearsing actions on the objective.”
You have to admit this about military training, it really sticks with you!
So, my first thought was whether, while rehearsing actions on the objective, the special forces teams would want to know every last detail of what was on the plane. My training falls far, far short of that, and my efforts to reach someone from 1st SFOD-D didn’t pan out (unsurprisingly).
I laid out my hypothetical for Shipley: during mission planning, would the operators want to know if the pilots had been scanned, at least to have a better sense of whether they’d carried any weapons on the plane?
The answer, quite simply, is that it wouldn’t be an immediate concern. I spoke with Shipley by phone today, and he said that whether the pilots had been scanned “would be a very distant ‘what if’.” He explained of the special forces teams, “They’d want to know who they [i.e., the crew] are,” as well as background on how long they’d been flying and any other information related to the incident. Also, Shipley said the teams would want to know if there was an air marshal on the flight. The role of body scans, however, would not be a major factor in planning or rehearsing an operation.
“There are some pretty good people in charge of those planes,” Shipley noted, “good bunch of guys and gals.”
Does it suck that someone else gets to go through security faster and more easily than you do? Yeah, it feels like an injustice. But, let’s be realistic: there really isn’t much at stake here aside from a sense of fairness. Let’s e smart about this, though. The airline industry – and the air travel experience – is fraught with inefficiency. If we can make the operation a little smoother by giving the crew an easier time of getting to work, let’s just bite the bullet on this issue.
Early yesterday afternoon I passed through O’Hare airport on the far end of terminal 3, approached the security checkpoint and was selected for scanning with a backscatter detector. With a boarding pass in my back pocket I was also selected for a pat down. In this case, the TSA officer used the back of his hands to check my entire back side – and sent me on my way (without the computer that I forgot at the checkpoint) to gate K7.
The Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) was a simple security measure that day, but today, on the nation’s busiest travel day many will face it for the first time. And in protest, many are advocating a movement to opt-out of the scans.
In lieu, those who opt out will be subject to an intensive pat down, the results of which has been covered on the web ad nauseum.
More importantly, however, is the added time necessary for a pat down. AIT scans already take longer than a quick walk through a magnetometer, and opting out of one adds further time to the affair. Some critics of the movement are thus concerned that unsuspecting passengers will be held up at security and more flights will be missed.
Needless to say, if 95% of passengers choose not to be scanned by an AIT device this Wednesday it’ll surely send a strong message to the brass at the Department of Homeland Security. If a few trouble spots cause innocent passengers to miss flights though, I’m not so sure that it’s worth it.
Let your kids kick the seats in front of them: it could save your life. If you’re the passenger being inconvenienced, it may behoove you to find a way to cope.
A kid who would otherwise be branded a royal pain found a loaded gun magazine … that should have been in the hands of a law enforcement official … on a Southwest Airlines flight. To make matters worse, the media was actually on the plane!
Here’s how it happened:
1. A kid was sitting on his mother’s lap during a flight from Burbank, California to Phoenix, Arizona
2. The plane landed, and the kid crawled across the seats in his row
3. His foot knocked an item to the floor – it was a loaded gun magazine
4. A flight attendant picked it up, but not before someone from a CNN crew, photographer Gregg Canes, saw it
5. The CNN passenger asked to take pictures of it, but the flight attendant would not let him
6. The gun magazine was turned over to the authorities
It’s that simple, folks … but it does get a lot more interesting.According to a statement by Southwest, “The item was immediately turned over to the crew working the flight who called in the local authorities to handle the investigation,” continuing, “The passengers who were remaining on that flight were rescreened and the plane was thoroughly inspected before returning to service.” They were ten allowed to get off the plane.
Southwest spokeswoman Brandy King told CNN that the officer who left the gun mag behind did follow the proper procedures to bring his gun on the plane. CNN adds:
“The full magazine was found in a back seat pocket,” a TSA official told CNN. “We believe it was left by a law enforcement officer on a flight that originated in San Jose and landed in Burbank. The officer was not an air marshal and we are trying to establish contact with the agent.”
Canes put it best: “It was actually almost funny, given the amount of scrutiny that we’ve been paying to the [Transportation Security Administration] and personal security. It seemed almost funny to see a magazine with bullets in it just sort of lying on the floor of a commercial jetliner.”
Need a bit of irony to round this out? Canes must have been in a gun state of mind; he was headed to Phoenix to cover a Sarah Palin book signing.
As if the TSA didn’t have enough to worry about this week …
Only hours before the busiest travel day of the year, news has gotten out that a TSA employee working at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta – the busiest airport in the country – attempted to commit suicide. It was a particularly grotesque situation, as he allegedly abducted a young woman, sexually assaulted her and gave her his suicide note to pass along.
Randall Scott King is reported to have snatched the woman from a MARTA parking lot last Wednesday night. He took her to his home in Hogansville, Georgia – around 50 miles from Atlanta – and allegedly assaulted her. King then let her go, bearing the suicide note he gave her.
When the alleged victim notified the authorities, King was found at his home with self-inflicted wounds – he’s now in critical condition at Columbus’ Regional Medical Center. He was a behavior detection officer with the TSA, where he has worked for close to five years, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
King and the woman he’s alleged to have abducted knew each other, according to airport spokeswoman Katena Carvajales: “They left the airport together voluntarily.”