(US Airways Boeing 767ER en route the Continental United States.)
The warm air mass seems to have prevailed against the chill wind from the North: the rain has been banished but now we feel- dare I say it? Summery?
It is muggy in the bright sun. Time for the pool am considering the flight next week to distance Honolulu, a sparkling destination in the mid-Pacific. I think about commercial air travel a lot less than I did in my salad days, when a quick jaunt across the Atlantic or Pacific were not uncommon events.
Things are a lot different today, of course. I really prefer to drive on any transit that will take less than twelve hours, since that is what even the most routine domestic flight seems to take these days. I mean, think about it. Beyond the indignity of a middle seat, full flight, and reduced leg room, there is that pervasive, intrusive and unpleasant security crap.
Back in the day, the conventional wisdom was to plan to arrive at the airport an hour before flight time, two hours if you are going overseas. These days it is wise to bump it up. Two hours is my comfort level of domestic flights and three is there are any passport or visa issues to be negotiated with the implacable apparatchiks of the Transportation Security Administration.
Take yesterday. Please.
US Airways Flight 787, a slick Boeing 767, was headed from Paris en route Charlotte, NC. Accounts say a passenger began acting strangely, prompting concerns for the safety of the two-hundred-odd travelers. A Cameroon-born French citizen who was headed to the United States for a 10-day visit passed a note to a flight attendant on a US Airways flight out of Charles de Gaul yesterday. She claimed she had a “device” surgically implanted in her body.
I have no idea what the woman was thinking. Could it have been confusion or panic when she was presented the CBP I-94 Arrival-Departure Record for Nonimmigrant Visitors with a Visa for the U.S.?
I know I have panicked with the idea that my pen is in the overhead bin and I am trapped in a middle seat. Did she wonder if surgical devices need be declared at their implanted cost? What about personal massage therapy appliances?
Anyway, it strikes me that any device should have been detected by the scanners in Paris, but maybe people are freaked out by the new non-metallic bomb technology that lunatic in Yemen is deploying. Still, the war of terror is no laughing matter (under penalty of law) and the Captain, secure behind his armored cockpit door, did the right thing.
He contacted ground control as his airplane arced Down East past Canada’s Maritime Provinces toward America. Control was definitely having no mischief on their watch, and the FAA contracted the North American Aerospace Defense watch at the Mountain in Colorado Springs.
(Entrance to The Mountain. I first walked through these doors in 1978. Pretty cool for an antique.)
Ever alert, and still stinging about NORAD’s so-so performance during the events of 9/11, the Command flashed the “launch the alert” message to two F-15Cs Eagle fighters on the strip at Barnes Air National Guard Base in south-central Massachusetts.
(F-15C Eagles on strip alert at Barnes Air National Guard Base.)
The Eagle drivers were vectored to the US Air flight, one taking position to engage from the stern hemisphere with the A-61 Vulcan gun mounted in the wing, while the other took up a position where the Captain of the commercial jet could see the fighter present.
Rather than permit the airliner to proceed to the intended destination, the fighters escorted it to Bangor International, the nearest CONUS airport. Federal officials, TSA, CBP and TSA, boarded the aircraft and removed the woman for questioning.
Reports this morning indicate there were no evident scars on her body, and presumably no “device.” That will have to wait for further analysis, I imagine, but I was wondering how comforted I would be to look out the window from seat 13A and see the Air Force off the left wing, armed with AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles and that Gatling gun.
What exactly were they going to do? Shoot it down?
OK: I know what you are thinking. It is better to have the Air Force on station and able to act, just in case. But let’s see: The woman did not claim she had a bomb. The bomb- if there was one- was not in the cockpit. And with the FAA alerted, they could route the jet over water so that even if the worst happened, it would not happen over a populated area.
Forgive me if I am less than comforted. I mean, I will still go to Reagan International next week and get on the plane. But this beyond surreal. You get on an airplane to try to go someplace and the next thing you know a deranged person with a possible vibrator has prompted the Department of Homeland Security to stick an A-61 Gatling gun up your butt.
Ah, air travel. I started plotting on how to incapacitate my seatmates ten years ago, should the need arise, but the Department of Homeland Security seems determined to take out the middleman.
(F-15C A-61 Vulcan Cannon in anti-terror mode.)
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com