You must have really long arms to reach the FA call button from the gate area; that's where the OP was sitting. :p

Umm... if you ask anyone at my local airport which of the two airlines they have heard of, I'd wager 99% would pick Air Namibia (who actually fly here). Southwest may be popular in some parts of the USA, but in the rest of the world Air Namibia is far and away better known.

Darn, I should have been on earlier. That was exactly my response when I saw the thread title.

Sorry about the SW thing, I know their sign is WN. WN out of PDX makes it all the more a strange occurrence - usually much less crazies (more hippies, but they're very benign).

Don't be. Everyone, and I mean everyone, knew what you meant. Well, maybe not quite everyone.
I didn't intend to include you as a geek :) , after all I knew which airline SW/NMB was too.

Like I said, an in-joke. Please disregard. Maybe it'll die a natural death, as it should.

Perhaps it was PhlyingRph doing another one of his "surveys".

You did the right thing by informing the GA, and I would do the same thing, but since she gave you the "he's harmless" brush-off, I've got to assume that he's some kind of undercover agent. You did your part, you passed the audition, and I think you can go on with your life knowing you did the right thing to report a possible weapon.

I haven't read the other answers and am curious to see if I'm right. Honestly, I'd be VERY SURPRISED if he was anything but undercover. Such remarks are taken seriously if they're from "real" crazies with "real" weapons.

Just to show you how "with it" I am :rolleyes: I also know that HP was America West (steak sauce aside) and Aeroflot was SU :cool:

Definitely not.

OK, and I can see that nobody else thinks so either, but if I went up to a GA in MSY and said, "So and so says he has a gun," we'd have a terminal dump/search immediately if not sooner. The threat is taken seriously, because it isn't that unbelievable that a crazy person could have a gun and it needs to be looked into.

At your airport, if you tell your GA, "that guy just said he had a gun," would she REALLY say, "oh that's his little joke, he's harmless," unless she was in on the undercover sting he's doing? I just don't see it...in my area, let's face it, guns are more common than not having guns. Even Harry Connick Jr. once got caught with a gun at the airport. It would not be considered "oh it's harmless, he's just a little odd." Hey, I'M a little odd. It would be looked into.

If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I just can't figure HOW I'm wrong.

Neither of those things happened. He did NOT say he had a gun right then and there...he SAID "many times I have my sidearm in my carry-on and they don't pick up on it"...and that is EXACTLY what I told the GA..."he did not say he had a gun right now, this is what he said...".

Nor did SHE say "he's harmless", as if she was in on a little joke...she said Security, AFTER talking with him, said he was harmless.

I thought that meant Hewlett Packard, the Virtual Airline. :)

Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't have bothered to report this. Whether he has a gun or not isn't my business. Whether he's a security risk or not isn't my business.

If he's a security risk with a gun, then that represents a massive TSA failure-- and I wouldn't mind seeing them get smacked around about that at all. Reporting it just increases the likelihood that it will be caught right then and swept under the rug.

Lets say that this person is a "massive TSA failure" and he is getting on the same airplane as you, do you still think it's none of your business?

I certainly do.

I also wouldn't report any note I found saying "BOB", "Bomb", "This plane will go down", or anything similar.

I also wouldn't report someone acting "suspicious" on board the plane, nor someone sitting there praying (of any religion), nor someone who claimed to have a bomb.

I wouldn't want my flight delayed for some lousy hoax. And besides, it's up to TSA to catch those people. They're not coming to my office and offering to help me do my job for free, so I'm not about to go one inch out of my way to help them do theirs.