Originally Posted by
blind pew
Gordomac
‘Indeed, only one one employer, at the height of the UK/Irish troubles was so concerned by the Belfast Crew Cafe bombing that they told us to avoid leaving the aircraft during extended turn-rounds and then, followed by asking for Volunteers for the turn-round sked.’
You obviously weren’t working for BEA at the time where we were all “volunteered” for Belfast with the threat of you won’t get a command if you do not go. Had BALPA force the company to validate our life insurance as we were flying into a War zone and to top it all hid and lied about the bombs found on the Trident or the genuine threats. With the odd case of bully cabin crew to accept wrong bars which had not passed the mandatory security checks.
Back on the subject we had a captain arrested in Anchorage who was dead heading on Alaskan Airlines after the airport was closed to us because of a volcanic eruption. AA hadn’t de iced and the wings were covered with a significant deposit of snow. He pointed this out twice to CC and basically told to shut up..long story short he opened the overwing exit saying he wasn’t staying onboard forcing the aircraft to return to the gate and was arrested and imprisoned.
The Swiss used diplomatic channels to get him released and he was banned from flying stateside.
My next trip I watched one of their aircraft take off and at rotation a cloud of snow blew off the wings.
They seemed to ignore conventional regulations wrt to de icing if it was dry snow on a cold wing!
That Anchorage case is exactly why I think this topic matters for crew. It shows how quickly a situation can escalate when a pilot raises a safety concern, even in a country with a strong aviation system. What really stands out is that the situation was resolved only because the pilot’s own authorities stepped in through diplomatic channels. Without that support, the consequences could have been far more serious. When you compare that to operations into countries with weaker due-process standards or higher levels of corruption, the exposure becomes much greater. A crew member can end up caught in a legal or criminal situation that has nothing to do with aviation — a hotel incident, a medical event, a misunderstanding — yet the outcome will depend entirely on how the local system treats foreign nationals. The case I mentioned from Kazakhstan , Captain Mohamed Barakat highlights exactly this point. The individual only travelled there because he was rostered on duty, yet when things went wrong there was no equivalent diplomatic support, no airline-level protection framework, and no industry mechanism to ensure a basic level of fairness. I’m not suggesting pilots should have immunity from local laws — nobody is arguing that. The issue is that in countries where international standards aren’t reliably met, and where foreign nationals can be particularly vulnerable, you would expect at least some form of structured support from employers or governments. Otherwise any one of us could find ourselves in a similar situation, solely because of where we’ve been sent to operate. That’s why I think it’s worth discussing what protections, guidance, or industry-wide standards (if any) should exist for crew operating into higher-risk jurisdictions.