Originally Posted by studentff
This, as with most such airline hostage situations, is a classic example of the people in charge not thinking a little out of the box to help some distressed people.
That's pretty much the way I read it too. It seems we were more concerned with "following regulations" than using common sense. The plane was diverted due to bad weather (fog). It's not like the terrorists are going to come up with a plot to fly AMS-SEA, create fog in SEA, get re-directed to Moses Lake and then be able to bypass customs. It's just not logical. (If it were some type of mechanical thing or something like that, a
stretched imagination may be able to skew it as some type of devious plot - but not weather).
Unless this plane was under scrutiny for some other reason (and everything in the Star Trib is simply a national security cover story), there is no reason to make people sit there for 18 hours. If you don't have reason to believe that someone is going to make a run for it with a bomb, you can let them into the airport terminal and have them hang out. What are they going to do? Have their buddies at Moses Lake run by and pick them up?