For Lack Of Common Sense

The juxtaposition of two stories involving air travel today show how a single act of terrorism can paralyze common sense for decades afterward.

It takes more than one person to bring down a commercial airliner, yet just one man was convicted for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988.  Abdel Bassett Ali al-Megrahi of Libya was released from prison yesterday under a controversial Scottish law that allows for “compassionate release” of terminally ill inmates.  Al-Megrahi has prostate cancer and doctors determined his case meets the criteria of having less than three months to live in order to go free before the end of a prison sentence.

The U.S. and Britain opposed this release, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown went to far as to request a subdued homecoming for Al-Megrahi.  The subsequent hero’s welcome in front of hundreds of young Libyans at the airport in Tripoli last night showed those wild and whacky Libyans don’t much care for what westerners consider “appropriate” in this case.  Their scapegoat for the bombings was free and it was time to celebrate.

The 259 people who died on flight 103 and on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland were given no “compassionate release” from this earth.  They were blasted out of the sky from 32,000 feet in altitude just before Christmas in 1988, and pieces of them rained down along with razor sharp flaming sections of the aircraft onto the sleepy little Scottish town where 11 people were killed on the ground.

The bombing brought an end to air travel as we knew it, to Pan-American Airlines, to any hope of detente between the U.S. and Libya. It also killed plane old common sense and I use the word plane instead of plain on purpose.  Air travel is nuts, because the other item making headlines today involves the releases of audio recordings between the pilot of a small commuter plane and the terminal in Rochester, Minnesota earlier this month.

On August 11th, Continental Express Flight 2816 departed for Minneapolis from Houston but was diverted by thunderstorms to Rochester.  Though the plane sat just 50  feet from the terminal, all 47 passengers were never allowed off the plane and into the terminal.  They sat with “wailing babies and a stinky toilet” for six hours overnight after they had already traversed the country from Texas.

The voice recordings reveal the pilot pleading with the  terminal to let passengers in the building, but because Transportation Safety Administration officials had “left for the day”,  it was deemed too much of a threat to our national security.   A TSA spokesperson has since contradicted this rule, stating the passengers could have been taken to a “sterile area” of the terminal.  By morning, the passengers were allowed into the terminal where they waited another couple of hours before boarding the same plane for Minneapolis.

No wonder the airlines are losing money and going out of business.   Who wants to risk a night like that? And that’s after the infamous Jet Blue Valentine’s Day debacle two years ago when passengers were stranded on a plane on the tarmac for eight hours with no toilet, no water, and plenty of wailing babies.

It is my belief that a business that lacks common sense cannot survive.  In this country air travel is like a barb with the tiny angled cuts that allow the sword to slide in, but not come back out without ripping huge amounts flesh.  Once you go through security in our airports, you can never, ever, ever, under any circumstances come back in.     You can only get on that plane and stay on that plane until it gets to another airport where you continue to move in only one direction.

We need a passenger Bill of Rights to protect us from the complete breakdown of common sense in air travel.  The early release of terrorist Abdel Bassett Ali al-Megrahi reminds us those early days of flying planes with large upholstered seats, real silverware, curtains and pretty stewardesses who greeted you as you boarded the plane as casually as you hopped a bus, are never coming back.

Tagged as: Air Travel, Libya, Pan Am 103, Syracuse University