(Now I appreciate that I might be falling into the trap of believing what I read in the newspaper), but I have to say that I was more than a little surprised to learn that two airlines of the calibre and standing of UA and AA appear to have had a procedure in place that had a pilot going into the cabin to intervene in an altercation between passengers and cabin crew. (“Pilot ‘lured’ from flight deck, then attacked by hijacker.”)
In my little airline, (a lot younger and with far fewer resources and experience than either of those two great airlines), it has been SOP for years now that when airborne, a pilot will NOT intervene in any problem in the cabin under any circumstances. This procedure wasn’t introduced primarily for the hijack situation, (although it was a consideration), but more for the air rage one. (Very sensibly, I think), the last thing our management and flight safety people wanted to see was a pilot wearing a bunch of fives from an angry, perhaps drunken pax and then having to stagger back to the cockpit – if he was still capable of doing so – to attempt to fly the aircraft.
This whole sorry mess might (and hopefully will) bring about a massive sea change in the attitude of the American public to litigation and that ‘someone must pay’ for every discomfort or frustration they suffer. Not a month before this, an American court awarded a woman 1.25 million dollars compensation for the ‘trauma’ she suffered as a passenger on a Delta flight where the crew did an exemplary job in successfully landing a stricken aircraft suffering major technical malfunctions in truly horrible weather conditions. I await, hopefully in vain, to see the myriad lawsuits that will surface after the current WTC tragedy.
Maybe this tragedy will convince Americans of something many people in less fortunate parts of the world have known for a very long time – sh-t happens, sometimes inexplicably, often tragically. Yes, safety and preventative procedures can and should be tightened in view of what’s just happened. But to all those coming out with sometimes sensible, sometimes ridiculous suggestions on how to slam the proverbial door behind THIS particular bolted horse, get it into your heads what all the experts will tell you should you ask. There is no way in the world short of putting each and every one of us in a steel box and never moving from it that you can stop an assassin who is willing to die in carrying out his mission.
I think that all of us, if we want to continue in the business of moving people from A to B, are going to have to face the fact of our mortality a little more consciously than we have perhaps been doing to date. (And so will the people we move from A to B.) There are desperate, not always crazy, people out there who have learned all too clearly over the last week, if they didn’t know it before, that they can make their ‘statement’ with relative ease if they are willing to die in the attempt and we have to face the sorry fact that short of strangling our transport industry to the point where we will all be walking to wherever we want to go, we’re going to have to live with it.