{"id":71,"date":"2005-12-08T07:57:48","date_gmt":"2005-12-08T14:57:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=71"},"modified":"2007-01-11T20:55:38","modified_gmt":"2007-01-12T03:55:38","slug":"acting-out-on-airliners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=71","title":{"rendered":"Acting Out on Airliners"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have to admit I’m curious as to what actually happened on American Airlines Flight 924<\/a>. Here’s what CNN said:<\/p>\n

Dave Adams, a spokesman for the Federal Air Marshal Service, said Alpizar had run up and down the plane’s aisle yelling, “I have a bomb in my bag.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But according to the same article:<\/p>\n

. . .no other witness has publicly concurred with that account. Only one passenger recalled Alpizar saying, “I’ve got to get off, I’ve got to get off,” CNN’s Kathleen Koch reported.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then there’s this<\/a>, from Fox:<\/p>\n

Before he ran off the plane he “uttered threatening words that included a sentence to the effect that he had a bomb,” said James E. Bauer, agent in charge of the Federal Air Marshal Service field office in Miami.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And this<\/a>, from Time:<\/p>\n

“I never heard the word ‘bomb’ on the plane,” McAlhany told TIME in a telephone interview.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, any time you have a lot of eyewitnesses, you’ll hear several versions of what happened. Still, I think it’s interesting that not one passenger is backing up the Federal Air Marshal Service claim that Alpizar made a bomb threat, a claim that the FAMS appears to be backing away from. Uttering “threatening words that included a sentence to the effect he had a bomb” is a long way from running “up and down the plane’s aisle yelling, ‘I have a bomb in my bag.'”<\/p>\n

Still, what’s an air marshal, or any flight crew member, to do when a passenger starts acting crazy? How can you instantly and correctly judge whether someone is acting strangely due to mental illness or acting strangely because he’s about to detonate a bomb? Remember Richard Reid, the shoe bomber<\/a>? With him, you had it all: weird behavior, outward manifestations of mental illness, and an actual attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for Mr. Alpizar, air travelers today live in a shoot first\/ask questions later world. There isn’t any leeway for manic-depressives who quit taking their meds and start acting out.<\/p>\n

. . . and I was going to end this entry there, but I just had a chilling thought: what if Mr. Alpizar wasn’t<\/em> mentally ill? What if Mr. Alpizar didn’t<\/em> freak out on that airplane? I’m thinking, of course, of Jean Charles de Menezes<\/a>, the poor Brazilian who was shot and killed by police in the London subway. Contrary to initial – and steadfastly repeated – police reports, he hadn’t been earlier observed acting suspiciously on subway surveillance cameras, he didn’t jump a turnstile, he wasn’t running from the cops, and he wasn’t wearing a bulky jacket that might have concealed a bomb. The only part of the story that turned out to be true was that the police shot him seven times. For some reason.<\/p>\n

I hope it’s true that Mr. Alpizar flipped out severely enough that the air marshals were justified in shooting him. I think that’s probably what happened. I hope that’s what happened.<\/p>\n

Update (12\/9\/05):<\/strong><\/font> Yesteday, Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly commented on the same discrepancies in news coverage<\/a>. Today, he posts an interesting followup<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have to admit I’m curious as to what actually happened on American Airlines Flight 924. Here’s what CNN said: Dave Adams, a spokesman for the Federal Air Marshal Service, said Alpizar had run up and down the plane’s aisle yelling, “I have a bomb in my bag.” But according to the same article: . […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,3,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-flying","category-media"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}