I flew over the weekend and could definitely tell that flight attendants were more "alert" than usual. Pilots on three of my four flights also made announcements reminding people to stay seated unless they absolutely have to be up, with much more emphasis than usual. One even said that "today it's mandatory that you keep…
Continue reading: Reminder: don’t make out on a flight on 9/11
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Typical American response. You really should renounce your German citizenship.
So are we supposed to suspend all freedoms on airplanes on 9/11 for all eternity? Maybe it would have been more helpful if the FAs, cops, SWAT, etc. weren't retarded and dealt with the issue like adults instead of shitting their pants. So what even if two people were making out in the lavatory?
Yeah, this is me rolling my eyes - both at you and the people on the plane.
@ abcx -- I've read your response a few times now, and I'm confused. I think we're saying the same thing? I'm saying that I suspect this was a huge waste of money and time and was ridiculous. What am I missing here?
@lucky - I think abcx finds your statements of "I'm all for erring on the side of caution" and pointing out the significant costs, both financial and to civil liberties, to be at odds with each other. These sort of guilty-until-proven-innocent events aren't exactly the things the Framers of the Constitution would be proud of.
@ Chris -- To me there's a difference between erring on the side of caution and having a "guilty-until-proven-innocent" mentality. For many it's one in the same, but that's not how I feel. For example, if you're on an international flight and a passenger spends half of the flight in the lavatory, I think it's reasonable to ask them if everything is alright and observe their behavior, rather than just assume they might be sick. You shouldn't call fighter jets or divert the flight, but is it unreasonable to just observe their behavior? To me that's erring on the side of caution, and not the crap that clearly went down on this flight, which was pure paranoia.
@ Lars -- Wow, what crap...
This is way worse that it seemed. One of the women detained wrote up her experience: http://shebshi.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/some-real-shock-and-awe-racially-profiled-and-cuffed-in-detroit/ - it is outrageous.
Privacy locks, indeed -- just found out about it a couple months back, when our 5-year-old locked himself in the bathroom on a 14-hour flight. We were getting tired of going into the bathroom with him every time so we taught him how to operate it himself, and then he managed to lock the door from the inside but couldn't open it. After several failed attempts at verbal instruction, my wife asked a flight attendant for help, and pop! We hadn't realized how easy it was to open these doors from the outside.
If we didn't have this nonsense paranoid vigilanteism, none of this would have happened. A guy needed to use the bathroom, and the airline and homeland security morons made their lives miserable, arrested them for no crime, and treated them like dirt. No constitutional protections.
There should be penalties against crew and passengers that create such overreactions and trigger fake incidents. Right now, unfortunately, anything goes in the name of 'security'. And that is against what America stands for.
@lucky: Observe? No, that's probably not unreasonable. Given the plane landed at DTW safely without intervention during the flight (consider the stories of passengers tackling the shoe/underwear bombers), the post-flight reaction was excessive.
It's a sad sign of the times where "no charges were filed for 'suspicious behavior'" is newsworthy: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/12/no-charges-against-3-deta_0_n_958150.html
Wow, that blog post from the woman makes me so mad.
Lucky, it was this question of yours that set me off - How beyond stupid do you have to be to make out in a lavatory on 9/11?
Maybe I overreacted a little bit, but I think this is was more than just a waste of time. It appears like a significant violation of civil liberties. And the three were racially profiled to boot.
Basically some xenophobic idiot reported two Indian guys and an Arab/Jewish woman for being suspicious.
And before anyone says it's safe to be sorry, you're just a bunch of cowards and aren't deserving of this country or the world. I would give my life so that others can enjoy the freedoms that we used to. It's a small price to pay and many have already done so before us.
I have been traveling the past couple of days, so I have been a bit out of the loop. Let me get this straight: a women gets up to let her seatmate into the aisle to go to the lavatory, a man she does not even know and who also was doing nothing wrong, and she gets cuffed, strip searched,and put in jail?