Originally Posted by
RadioGirl
But I too would find it odd if someone who routinely shuttles between two residences, someone experienced enough to travel transpac with only a small carry-on, or someone with enough FF miles to bother with a MR is too claustrophobic to fly, and only discovers that fact once on board the aircraft. (NB: Not "suspicious", not "dangerous", just "odd.")
This. The OP's anecdote reminds me of some of the FAM accounts in the documentary,
Please Remove Your Shoes, and I do not consider it
impossibly far-fetched that this type of experience is a 'security probe'.
Which is more likely: someone who is terrified of flying brought no baggage whatsoever on a transcon flight, or the guy left some baggage on the plane? Probably he left some baggage on the plane, although both scenarios are possible. And if the guy did leave baggage on the plane, was it intentional or inadvertent? Of course it is completely plausible that a claustrophobic passenger would be too panicked to consider his baggage, or even that he begged the staff to remove his checked baggage and they denied his request.
A string of statistically unlikely coincidences:
1. A passenger panics and demands to exit the plane after it left a gate (This has certainly happened on less than 1% of my flights; it has never happened to me.) Let's say 0.1% of flights have an incident like this.
2. That passenger left the flight with no luggage. I'm guessing less than one percent of transcon passengers have no luggage, so let's say a 1% chance he didn't leave anything on the plane.
3. That passenger is of a demographic which has probed holes in airline/airport security in the recent past. I'm guessing that less than 1% of US domestic passengers are young men of Middle Eastern descent.
If only #1 and #2 are true, then we are talking about a 1-in-100,000 chance of the incident happening randomly.
Given 600 million enplanements per year in the US, let's use a nice conservative number and say that 1-2%, or 10 million of these enplanements are on transcons. That would still mean that #1 + #2 would occur a hundred times per year by chance, or twice a week.
Add #3, and now we are talking a 1-in-10,000,000 chance of this happening randomly. (Passenger-initiated deplanement, not removing luggage, and being a member of a specific demographic which has a record of probing security holes.) Still likely to happen completely by chance once or twice a year, but definitely more noteworthy.
I would say that objectively, the passenger's gender, age, and ethnicity raise the (remote) possibility that this was a security probe. I understand that the overwhelmingly vast majority of young men of Middle Eastern descent are not terrorists, but I also recognize that the terrorists currently targeting the USA are young men of Middle Eastern descent. Would we be having this discussion if the passenger was a black grandmother? No. Does that mean that the discussion is racist? Not in my opinion.
Does that mean the incident had any security implications? Probably not.
Originally Posted by
Zaynab
What I do not understand from the remarks by several posters in this thread is that in the security conscious United States, the "passenger and luggage should be on the same plane" rule is only applied across the oceans. What is the logic? Is the security risk lower on intra-US flights?
+1. Weren't some of the the 9/11 flights domestic transcons?
Of course, logic and the US's current implementation of "airport security" have little in common. The fact that the luggage is all 'screened' gives me no comfort, given the huge failure levels on official tests.