GUWonder

Presidential Secret Service Detail has teams that travel primarily commercial too.. namely, the advanced team.

aflyer

Wow. I didn't know that the SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION had that sort of capability for its employees!

R&R

That list 2 above didn't apply in Paris for the AA flight. All the markers, but still allowed to board.

Plato90s

Actually, AA did yank the bomber off his first flight. It was the French Border Police who cleared the passenger to board the next available flight, so I think AA did their job properly in that case as well.

RSSrsvp

At what point based on the facts presented will you acknowledge that the AA pilot stepped over the line when he removed the Secret Service agent?

suzieq

Don't law enforcement agencies have access to NCIC Computers (like on TV) to send messages. Perhaps an official message could have been sent from the airport police to the secret service headquarters to assist in verification of identity?

jimquan

Listen up people! I like to jump to conclusions and argue without the facts as much as anyone else. Been there, done that.

Can we please be respectful enough to type out SECRET SERVICE instead of SS? For some reason this bothers me. Call them Treasury Agents, call them feds, call them Presidential Detail, call them POTUS's boys and girls. Don't call them SS!!!!!

And you can even edit your posts. I know you know how to do it. You can cut and paste directly from this post. You have my permission.

As for SSA .... ROFLMAO!

In keeping with Flyertalk's primary mission, I hope he got to keep his miles. It's legal for feds now you know!

Jim

dlm

AA in the news again. My confidence in this airline has reached new lows. How can they let the shoe bomber on and not a SSAgent. Bottom line, I will avoid AA until they show some good judgement.

BTW this pilot should be transferred to the cargo run in the nordic routes.

Hoping for a better year in '02.

Plato90s

Stepped over the line?

If you are asking whether the pilot exercised good judgment, probably not.

But what would you have the airline do? FAA regulations is clear on the matter. If AA were to seat the SS agent over the captain's objection, then AA would be in violation FAA regulations.

AA did the best they could. They followed FAA regulation, and put the SS agent on a different flight.

So, I do think AA did the right thing here, just like they did the right thing in CDG. Individuals make mistakes, but the airline, as a whole, is certainly doing its job right.

I see no reason why we should avoid the term SS. It's a term which predates Nazi Germany, and I see no reason to change it.

jongar

cordelli,

Mickey Mouse is not running security - he's runnig the whole show

venk

Where AA failed and continues to fail is in setting the attitudes, expectations and guidelines right as a corporation that enables its employees to perform well. I have found individual behavior from AA employees too erratic to imagine there is any corporate culture being promoted.

There was no such thing as "AA" doing anything in that airport. Various employees of AA were involved in their individual capacities. I have been in a situation at MIA where an AA employee directed me to an incorrect desk "just because she didn't want to handle my case". I would suspect that the ground staff at the second flight made their own decision to not allow this agent to board and it would be a cascading set of errors from ill-managed ground staff. This is a common refrain I have heard from several AA passengers when things go wrong (missed flights, baggage, incorrect ticketing, etc.)

What AA should be doing as an airline is to have responsible individuals at the airport who can handle these types of exceptions. The airline had the responsibility to either make sure that the Agent was denied boarding entirely because there was a genuine problem or provided a quick alternate to the initial decision. The reality is most likely that the Agent would have been simply asked to go to the next flight's desk and explain the situation and try to get on it. The second missed flight should never have happened and this is not "just following FAA rules".

AA really sucks as a corporation. I will not fly in this airline (along with some other badly managed airlines) because such a corporate environment breeds mistakes and some mistakes will turn out to be fatal to the passenger. The number of bad events at AA recently is not simply a coincidence.

RSSrsvp

So now is it permissible to have airline pilots dictate to our law enforcement agencies what their agents can and cannot do while on they are on official duty?

This pilot not only used poor judgement, but played around with the rules regarding the paperwork submitted (which was good enough for the 1st flight) to make an excuse to deny the agent a seat on his plane.

By the way, since when does an airline pilot have the law enforcement background and experience to be involved in the questioning of this agent? This should only be handled by the airport's security firm and the police.

President Bush was quoted on the news this morning about how he was upset with this incident. Don't forget that this agent has top security clearance which permits him to carry a firearm in our leader's presence and the mission to protect him. I guess that AA has higher standards for their passengers.

sbrower

I don't think that this incident was caused by a problem which is unique to AA. However, I do think that AA's response (to date) has made them look bad. I expect that they will, in the near future, come up with a better one. (I am one of those who very much likes AA, so I have confidence that they will, in due course, figure out that they made serious errors in their initial handling of this matter.)

To my surprise (I admit my earlier predictions to the contrary) this appears to be a clear case of "pilot error".

Recognizing that the PIC has the theoretical right to make the final decision, there is still a problem here. What if a pilot said "I feel that I am unable to ensure the safety of my passengers with any non-citizens onboard." or "I feel that I am unable to ensure the safety of my passengers with more than 10 people on board." I presume that the response of the airline would be to remove him from flight status ASAP.

As noted by another poster above, what AA (and the other airlines?) have failed to do is to provide clear guidelines of authority for handling these instances of "flight crew concern." Some are legitimate (AA in France) and some are not.

[This message has been edited by sbrower (edited 12-28-2001).]

Always Flyin

Virtually all federal law enforcement officers are permitted to carry weapons aboard aircraft. You don't like that? Wake up and join the real world.

These are trained personnel who have undergone extensive background checks. Think how riduculous it would be if there were a highjacking and we later learned that there was an FBI agent on-board, but he couldn't do anything since the pilot didn't want him carrying a weapon.

Whether a federal law enforcement officer carries a weapon on an aircraft is up to the agency and the officer--not the airline or the pilot. In the case of local law enforcement agents, the pilot and can refuse to allow the officer to carry his weapon--not so in the case of federal officers.

As we have seen, the pilot can refuse to carry the passenger at all, but that was a very big mistake on his part in this case. Verification of status is a non-issue. They very easily could have verified the agent's status in less than 5 minutes.

Another important issue pertains to access to the cockpit in flight. Not surprisingly, Federal Aviation Administration employees must be granted access to the cockpit during flight on demand. (The FAA has internal policies on who can and who can't.) Who is the only other agency? The Secret Service.

A pilot may have command over a flight, but it is not without oversight. A minimum six month suspension should be in order in this case. For AA to back him up is indefensible.

Plato90s

The answer is... yes.

The whole point of the FAA regulation is that while on the aircraft, an airline pilot has absolute authority, the same as a naval captain at sea.

The president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but if he's onboard a Navy vessel, the captain has the right to order even the President around if the captain chooses the exercise his command authority.

Of course, said Navy captain will face severe consequences afterwards, but it's all legal and proper. The federal police agencies are not responsible for the safety of each individual aircraft, the pilot is.

That's why pilots have the authority to eject anyone who is a security risk, in their opinion.

Now, let's address recent events. AA's staff exercised the right to eject passengers they cosider a security risk in Paris in the case of the shoe-bomber. Then the the local police assured AA that he was okay. Local police was wrong, leading to a terrorist incident.

Now, mere days later, we have an airline pilot who want to eject a passenger, only to be assured by local police that this passenger was okay. Sound familiar?