Questions re key cards
 

from CNN's web site (whether its relevant to the current situation remains to be seen but interesting nevertheless):

"American Airlines uniforms and a pilot's key card -- which grants access to the holder to any American Airlines facility in the world -- were taken from a hotel in Rome, Italy, earlier this year, police said Thursday"

Questions:

1. Why do pilots carry around world-wide access cards?

and

2. When one goes missing, why can't it be locked out or the system reset? (Hotels do it for example)

Well, the technology certainly does exist to lock it out, as you said in (2).

I just encountered this today. I had an access card that I got yesterday, worked until after closing, so just kept it. About noon or so, it suddenly would not unlock to doors to my work area.

When I took it down to security, they expalined that all visitor's cards are encoded with an expiration time/date just in case one gets out the door.

FWIW

CNN (or its sources) didn't confirm that the key card was actually still operational at actual AA facilities, did they? Why assume that it was still in fact working?

(The large company I once worked for issues employee ID badges which opened different sets of facilities for different hours, depending on employee classification. As a software engineer, I could get into almost any building but manufacturing, and my badge was good 24/7. So I'm not surprised that AA pilots had employee badges would open just about everything. But once an employee leaves the company, my former company's HR fairly quickly deactivates their card.)