Eideard

A suspicious white substance in an airplane bathroom?

It could be anthrax, could be explosive residue or — as authorities in California learned Friday — it could be toilet paper.

The white dust appeared in the back lavatory of Alaska Airline’s Flight 508 soon after it took off Friday afternoon from Seattle, said Bobbie Eagan, a spokeswoman for the carrier. Sometime during the 1,000-mile flight, the flight’s crew notified authorities about the unknown substance and asked for help.

Fire department crews, law enforcement officers and hazardous materials experts circled the plane soon after it touched down shortly after 4 p.m. at John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, California, according to Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Mike Fergus.

The aircraft’s 151 passengers and six crew members deplaned, and authorities climbed on board. They included members of the Orange County Fire Authority, who along with members of the county’s sheriff department tested the suspicious substance.

Capt. Greg McKeown, the fire department’s spokesman, said that authorities eventually determined that white dust actually was a “cellulose paper material” — or, in other words, what appeared to be toilet paper.

Phew. Another critical incident for Homeland Security successfully resolved. Probably only cost how much? $10,000? $20,000? Good thing we can afford all this security, eh?

The American Civil Liberties Union plans to sue the U.S. government on behalf of 10 citizens or legal permanent residents who have been placed on a no-fly list and, in some cases, stranded abroad.

The number of names placed on the list has increased significantly since the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound aircraft on Christmas Day, U.S. officials said. Some Americans have been barred from flying home from overseas because their names were listed.

“It really is abominable that they would treat U.S. citizens this way,” said Ben Wizner, a staff lawyer at the ACLU’s National Security Project. “There is simply no legal basis for placing a U.S. citizen into involuntary exile. And to use a secret government list without any process to accomplish that goal is so un-American and so unconstitutional…”

“The government does not provide the individual with any opportunity to confront, or to rebut, the grounds for his possible inclusion on the watch list,” according to the suit, which will be filed in Oregon. “Thus, the only ‘process’ available to individuals is to submit their names and other identifying information to the Department of Homeland Security and hope that an unknown government agency corrects an error or changes its mind.”

An FBI spokesman declined to comment on the suit, noting that the agency had not seen it. He referred to a previous statement on the no-fly list that said that the “FBI is always careful to protect the civil rights and privacy concerns of all Americans…”

I’m glad I wasn’t drinking my morning cuppa when I read that line. 50 years in the civil rights movement gets you any number of confrontations with the FBI – at home, on the street, where you’re employed. I might have gotten tea on my monitor.

The 10 plaintiffs in the ACLU suit were barred from getting on planes since December; seven were stopped while attempting to fly to the United States and three while trying to leave the country or take a domestic flight.

Ayman Latif, 32, a former U.S. Marine, said he was attempting to return to Miami from Egypt with his wife and two children in April when he was told he could not board the aircraft and should contact the U.S. Embassy. Since then, he said, he has repeatedly visited the embassy, where the FBI interviewed him, but he cannot get the no-fly ban lifted.

“We are very stressed over here,” Latif, who said he moved to Egypt to study Arabic, said in a phone interview. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m not a terrorist. . . . If I did something, fine, give me due process.”

One of the ten in the suit is from New Mexico. A former fireman in Las Cruces and at the White Sands Test Facility, retired Air Force officers – and he’s a convert to Islam and, oh yeah, the FBI told him one of the reasons for his ordeal is that he’s a graduate of New Mexico State University. And the father of a guy who is a terrorist once taught there.

Great reasoning power in our intelligence services.

The Harper government has quietly presented a bill in the House of Commons that would give U.S. officials final say over who may board aircraft in Canada if they are to fly over the United States en route to a third country.

“Canadian sovereignty has gone right out the window,” Liberal transport critic Joe Volpe told The Gazette in recent telephone interview. “You are going to be subject to American law…”

At present, airlines are only required to give passenger information to the U.S. government on flights landing in the United States…

If you are on a no-fly list or have the same name as someone on a no-fly list, you could be questioned, delayed or even barred from the flight. If your name does not match, Homeland Security tells the airline you may have a boarding pass.

Currently, Canadian airlines check names against no-fly lists provided by the United States and Canadian governments. But the airlines decide who gets a boarding pass.

Volpe noted that Bill C-42 does not refer specifically to the United States, adding that “with a stroke of the pen” the government is agreeing to provide data on Canadian passengers to any foreign government.

“They just opened the door to everybody without even so much as, ‘Hello, why are you doing this?’

“They can harass our airlines, harass our passengers, anything they want to.”

RTFA. Especially if you’re one of our Canadian readers.

Living inside the belly of a bully doesn’t make me feel any safer.

Southwest turns out to be the best – again
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Overall, air travelers’ level of contentment with carriers is on the rise, according to the University of Michigan’s latest American Customer Satisfaction Index for the airline industry. The findings are similar to the J.D. Power and Associates 2010 North America Airline Satisfaction Study released last week…

“Airlines are creating more satisfied passengers, but the… data suggest this won’t last for long,” said Claes Fornell, founder of the satisfaction index, in a statement.

“Airlines are already beginning to charge higher fares. Flights are becoming more crowded, and the increasing number of carry-ons could lead to cabin congestion and delays.”

When it comes to individual airline satisfaction rankings, Southwest Airlines leads the pack for the 17th straight year, followed by Continental and American, according to the index, which uses customer interviews to come up with a score on scale of 0 to 100. United Airlines was at the bottom of the list…

Southwest’s flight attendants were also voted as the friendliest in the industry, followed by Delta/Northwest, JetBlue and American.

But the staff at Delta/Northwest seems to have as many foes as fans, because the airline was also ranked as the carrier with the least-friendly flight attendants in the survey. United and American were ranked second and third in that category…

As for which airline has served the worst food over the past 12 months, Delta/Northwest led the pack, followed by United and American.

Paranoid politicians and chickenshit voters have solved the whole question of air travel for me. As long as DHS and TSA are in charge of air travel – I won’t go anywhere I can’t drive in my pickup truck.

Easyjet has unveiled a system that it says will allow airlines to safely fly around ash clouds. It involves infra-red technology that allows pilots to see the damaging particles up to 62 miles ahead.

The theory is that a pilot can then change course and continue to fly safely…

Earlier this year, many air passengers had their travel plans wrecked when airlines had to scrap thousands of flights due to the Icelandic volcanic ash problem…

Easyjet’s proposed Avoid system will work in theory by spotting ash at sufficient distances to allow air traffic controllers enough time to re-plan flight paths. It will also act as a “spy in the sky” – giving traffic control extra detail on any ash clouds that are out there. The device, which works using infra-red technology but essentially looks like another radar in the cockpit, is light, small and easy to install…

Easyjet, which is spending $1.47 million on the system, says it is happy for rivals to share its knowledge.

Mr Harrison, said: “What we don’t want to do is to gain a commercial advantage over other airlines so we can fly and they can’t. We are not going to exclude people from this technology.”

He said the hardest part would be to get approval from European authorities.

That certainly doesn’t surprise anyone, does it? The premise of safety designs in the EU seems to be preventing law suits more than anything else. That and not losing elections.

Upon reflection, that doesn’t seem very different from Congress – does it?

A Swedish pilot without a valid licence to fly has been arrested at Amsterdam as he was about to fly a jet with 101 passengers to Turkey, Dutch police say.

The 41-year-old man said he had been flying for European airlines for 13 years and had logged 10,000 hours.

Police said he once had a licence to fly small planes but it had expired and it did not allow him to fly large jets…

Turkey’s Corendon Airlines said he had been flying for the airline for two years and had “expertly misled the company with his false papers”.

The airline said it had been alerted by police and had a pilot standing by to fly the Boeing 737 from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport to Ankara.

Was he doing a decent job of piloting – or was he just fooling people into thinking he was good enough – or were the authorities just doing a lousy job of checking standards?

Few people expect luxury while flying, but these days, even the basics seem to be in bad shape.

It’s not uncommon to find your tray table broken, the in-flight entertainment system not working and your seat cushion worn — all of which can make you think, how old is this plane anyway?

It won’t be an issue for passengers who board the shiny new Boeing 787 Dreamliner when it enters commercial service — perhaps sometime next year if everything goes smoothly during its testing period…

But for now, the reality for many U.S. air travelers is that most of their journeys take place on planes that have been in service for a decade or more and show it, though in ways that have no impact on their safety — like worn interiors, broken creature comforts and less than spotless conditions…

“It’s inevitable you draw the link, even subconsciously sometimes, between whether a plane is cosmetically well maintained with whether it’s safe,” said Joe Brancatelli, who flies dozens of times a year and runs JoeSentMe.com, a Web site for business travelers…

In fact, it has been a while since most Americans have experienced that new plane smell.

The average age of the fleet of the seven large U.S. passenger airlines — including American, Alaska, Continental, the merged Delta and Northwest, Southwest, United and US Airways — is about 14 years old, according to The Airline Monitor.

It found American and Delta/Northwest had the oldest fleets, at about 16 years on average. As of the end of 2008, a small percentage of the merged Delta/Northwest’s planes dated back to the late 1960s.

U.S. fleets are among the oldest in the world, said Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at the Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia.

RTFA. There’s a bit of babble about safety regulations – which doesn’t mean squat unless the regulations are enforced. Anyone know of any regulations, at all, anywhere, that were enforced during the Bush/Cheney years? We have eight years worth of mediocrity to fix.

C’mon – we only have time to do half the load, anyway

While a lot of attention has been paid in recent days to the need to find better ways to screen passengers and their luggage, as aviation security officials try to keep terrorists — or Slovak security officials — from smuggling explosives onto passenger jets, it remains an uncomfortable fact that entirely unscreened packages are still routinely loaded into the cargo holds of those same airplanes.

According to the Transportation Security Administration, it currently screens “at least 50 percent” of the packages loaded into the cargo holds of passenger jets alongside travelers’ suitcases. Last February, the security administration announced that it had “issued security directives to all air carriers requiring that they screen 50 per cent of cargo placed on passenger aircraft,” and was working to meet an August, 2010 deadline set by Congress in 2007 to ensure the screening of every package that flies on these planes.

The following month a report by the Government Accountability Office explained that “TSA’s approach relies on the voluntary participation of shippers and freight forwarders,” in a program where most of the screening is to be done by private companies at the locations where goods are loaded into boxes…

Department of Homeland Security, confirmed (questions from the Times) – “While much remains to be done to fulfill this requirement, TSA is confident that the industry is currently screening at least 50 percent of air cargo transported on passenger aircraft on flights originating in the United States and anticipates that the 100 percent screening requirement will be met by August 2010 for domestic cargo. [...]“

That makes us all feel more secure, doesn’t it? Planning on flying before August?

The last time Terry Williams can remember being headache-free was in December. A chronic migraine has plagued her ever since. So have balance and vision problems, a tremor in her left arm, a prickly sensation in her feet and a loss of childhood memories.

The ailments, she says, began April 11, 2007. Williams, then a veteran American Airlines flight attendant of 17 years, noticed a “misty haze type of smoke” on Flight 843 as it taxied toward a gate in Dallas, Texas.

That “fume event,” as it is known, and the physical maladies she felt afterward drove Williams, 40, to file a product liability lawsuit late Tuesday in Seattle, Washington, against Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, aircraft manufacturers linked to the MD-82 aircraft she was on. Her claim: Toxins in the cabin’s air made her sick, and a design flaw — the lack of filters and sensors — left her unprotected.

They “knew or should have known that toxic nerve agents, contaminates, and dangerous fumes could bleed into the plane’s ventilation system, causing serious and irreversible health effects,” her attorneys said in a written statement…

Within several weeks, Williams says, she had to make repeated visits to emergency rooms before a neurologist told her she’d been the victim of toxic exposure.

Read the rest of this entry »

Daylife/AP Photo by Akira Suemori

A federal task force that spent nearly a year wrestling with ways to assist people delayed for hours aboard planes parked on tarmacs has finalized its recommendations — none of which requires airlines and airports to do anything.

If you wondered why Americans have nothing but contempt for government – read the article.

The tarmac task force, as it is informally known, is expected to vote on guidelines for airlines and airports on how to craft their own contingency plans for dealing with lengthy tarmac delays.

Kate Hanni, a task force member and passenger rights advocate, said Tuesday there is nothing in the draft document that requires airlines or airports to provide additional services for passengers stranded aboard airplanes going nowhere…

“We were hoping at a bare minimum to come out of this task force with a definition of what is an extensive on-ground delay,” Hanni said, but that didn’t happened because the airline industry “doesn’t want anything that is remotely enforceable.”

Perish the thought that our elected officials and assorted lackeys might come up with a solution to problems that might inconvenience corporate America. So – one more time – the essential message from Washington is Screw the Consumer!