Originally Posted by
EDLB
Yes you wonder about his decision making capability. There is not much worse what you can do to end your career for all technical or travel involving jobs. A few years earlier and they would have water boarded him at Gitmo for this.
Perhaps his decision-making was skewed by alcohol? Almost exactly 40 years ago I knew of a college kid about his age who, likewise a great aviation enthusiast but highly inebriated, after the bars closed tried to scale the fence of a nearby Strategic Air Command base because he wanted to get a closer look at the B-52s parked there, he loved them that much. Being the Cold War era, SAC wasn't amused at all by his hi-jinx, not in the least and even though he was clearly an idiot (I mean, you have to start Stupid in order to do something THAT stupid under the influence of alcohol because a Not Stupid person would've had to drink so much in order to get that stupid they'd pass out long before they could imagine something like that would be a good idea let alone actually try). They kept him as a special guest at the base for a week before telling anyone where he was or turning him over to the cops, most likely reminding him how shooting him while trying to come over the fence was in their bag of options to use. He didn't get killed, but his career certainly did while still in it's infancy.
So this sort of thing isn't new, but I find it incredibly lame that anyone would flush it all just to look at a garden-variety Airbus airliner. A 321 of all things, not even a widebody. How could anyone be so attracted to something so banal and unexciting they'd trash their aviation career to go have a look? There's not even the slightest chance of any weapon let alone a nuclear device being aboard like a SAC B-52 in the '70s which at least is built by Boeing and has 4 X the engines, so if he's no terrorist then at minimum he's guilty of being enamored by super-Boring aircraft on top of being super-Dumb, which adds up to it being a super-Pathetic act of Stupidity. Frankly, if I were him, as a pilot I'd be embarrassed by my choices.
I attribute this present day kid's lack of imagination and stunted sense of thrill-seeking while committing a (probably, hopefully) alcohol-fueled trespassing crime to spending too much time growing-up indoors playing video games that don't even cost money to replay and receiving participation trophies instead being outside skateboarding without helmet or sissy pads and having rock fights with his friends where winners and losers are automatically self-evident. That's my theory anyway, which actually gives him a small crumb of benefit of the doubt while apportioning a measure of blame to his parents who kept buying him Xboxes and putting those participation trophies in a showcase instead of throwing them in the nearest garbage dumpster where they belonged.
If he's not a terrorist and did it sober, well then, his act is simply beyond all comprehension except perhaps to other super-Boring, unimaginative people who although may exhibit signs of intelligence while living in a cocoon are by-and-large clueless once released into the world. If that's the case, he's beyond hope.