TSA Orders Toddler Off of Plane
 

Just when you think the TSA can't do anything more stupid then they already have the last couple weeks...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1505648.html

Wow. This is getting ridiculous!

What if we change the title of this post to read;

"TSA allows family to fly but they choose not to because of the wife's appearance,"

Why would 'we' want to do that? It would be a complete distortion of the facts.

It's entirely possible that if the family had reboarded, someone on the plane would have refused to fly with them on the plane - out of an abundance of caution and because if they were pulled from the plane, well, then they must have been guilty of something, right? :rolleyes:

Very poor reporting.

TSA is putting the blame on JetBlue. If that's true, and someone on the flight (pax or crew) just got nervous about a woman traveling with a headscarf (possible), then I don't understand where the story about the child being on the watch list came from.

TSA allegedly says that if the child and her parents were issued boarding passes, they were clearly not on the no-fly list. Wonder how that works if the 18-month-old was a lap child and not issued her own boarding pass or even 'declared' until the gate? I don't know how this works - does the lap child's name get supplied at the gate, entered into the system and then get checked against the no-fly list? I often hear gate agents announcing that if you have a lap child and he/she isn't shown on your boarding pass, approach the podium to take care of it.

The husband's comment seemed ill-advised to me (based on the story), because the child seemed to be the 'problem', not him or his wife, although I can certainly understand his irritation.

Also an interesting time table - they had 'just boarded', are deplaned and held for 30 minutes and the plane still hasn't closed the door. Quite possible, but they must have been in a fairly early boarding (or pre-boarding) group for this to be the case.

Well...it's obvious because according to TSA:

Baby = terrorist
Baby with hijab wearing mommy = even more dangerous terrorist

Child hugging grandma = suspect
Diabetic child = artfully concealing suspect

I'm confused why it took 30 minutes to determine that an 18 month old shouldn't be on the no fly list. How did someone on the no fly list get on the plane anyway? Isn't that what the Secure Flight or whatever it's called program for? I thought that data was checked against the no fly list.

See my post above.

The child was young enough to be a lap child. AFAIK, that means she wouldn't be required to have her own boarding pass. I've heard announcements at the gate telling people travelling with lap infants to check their boarding passes to see if the infant was declared or not - if not, to go to the podium for a new BP. That may be what happened here.

It is particularly offensive to say, "We're not looking into it."
The appropriate PR answer is always "We are already looking into this incident."

The TSA's astounding hubris and pathetic PR tactics are mind-blowing. If something hits national news, you always say, "We'll look into it," "We are looking into it," "We are already talking to people involved in the incident..."

But they're the TSA. They have a carte blanche to steal, humiliate, and irradiate.

There is no mention that she was or was not a lap child. Even if that was the case, the TSA would not have been involved. I could see that the child was not on the manifest and the headcount came up +1 when the FAs did their walkthrough. That should not require being pulled from the plane and talking to someone in a blue shirt and tin badge - or a 30 minute wait. The gate agent could have simply reprinted a BP and delivered it to the parents on board. Both the parents and Jet Blue point at TSA.

The solution to this he-said-she-said between JetBlue and TSA is simple: fire everyone involved on both sides and name and shame them in the press.

Any B6 employee who allowed this incident to continue after seeing that the target was a toddler should be fired. B6 employee should have got his or her manager rather than caving to the alleged TSA demand to speak with the pax.

Any TSA employee who allowed this incident to continue after seeing that the target was a toddler should be fired. (stripped of pension benefits and barred from public service for life too) The TSA employee should have exercised one or two brain cells, recognized that 1) this was a toddler, and 2) the passenger was already screened by TSA, and let these people go instead of harassing them for half an hour.

While we're at it, let's fire the B6 and TSA spokesholes who keep deflecting blame onto the other. The only acceptable PR response to this incident is "we deeply apologize to the family and are looking into what compensation is appropriate for them."

And to be thorough, let's fire the first level and perhaps second level managers of all the people above.

I'm not joking. I think doing this after one or two of these incidents would put a permanent stop to them. We should make these abusive incidents so toxic that no employee--airline, TSA, airport, or LEO--wants to go anywhere near them other than to defuse them.

^^^

I was afraid that the Underwear Bomber II incident would be a windfall of credibility for the TSA. Fortunately, with this incident, the TSA has self-corrected and have taken care of negating and potential perception of competence themselves.

I'm inclined to think Jetblue is the culprit here (and I'm no TSA aplogist). I think crew and/or pax saw the woman's headscarf and got scared.

First, if the child was on the 'no-fly' list, she wouldn't be allowed to fly. Period. If she was on the watch-list, supposedly the airlines are allowed to 'clear' her at checkin based on her obvious age, despite the alleged name match. (I thought Secureflight was supposed to reduce this by doing a match on names and birthdates, but perhaps not).

Second, according to the story, the airline employee specifically said that the problem was not the wife, but the child. The husband clearly thought the problem was his wife's headscarf. Maybe he was right and the Jetblue employee was just engaging in a bit of misdirection.

At any rate, if Jetblue calls TSA and reports suspicious pax, TSA is going to show up. Possibly even TSA will realize, after 30 minutes, that if the parents and kid were cleared for boarding passes, cleared the checkpoint, and nothing further (LEO checks?) turns up, there is no reason to stop them from flying.

The comments on this story are ridiculous. On and on about how 'everyone' knows Muslims have an established history of using infants and small children to commit violent acts of terror. I'd like to see just a couple reliable cites to establish this, particularly considering that Pistole recently announced less severe focus on children under 12 (as well as seniors) - a risk assessment based, presumably, on good intel.

It appears that Jet Blue lied to the passengers, and continues to lie about the TSA's involvement. Much as I and many others despise TSA, airlines should not be able to use that general perception to cover up and deflect attention from their own discriminatory acts.

EDITED TO ADD: Really? TSA may not even have been called?

Shame on you, Jetblue.

ETFA: OK, found another quote: So, how is that consistent with the first quote above?

Could it be that the "TSA agents" were not really TSA agents? Curious.

That hasn't stopped gate searches.

It's "for your protection".