Some dipshit tried to open the door of plane --at altitude -- requiring a flight to be diverted. The passengers managed to gather together and eventually subdue the idiot, but this is beginning to become a recurring scenario. There are far too many people in the air these days who seem to have a death wish or no self-control.
Besides terrorists, you now have to worry about drunks. People who have just had a bad day. People with no control over their temper or faculties. The really telling thing is, that usually, there's little or no warning that there's going to be trouble. You can profile a terrorist, and you can predict their behaviors and actions, to a certain extent, but how do you defend an aircraft against the passenger in coach who's pissed because he didn't get his complimentary half-can of Coke, and who decides to express his out-of-proportion anger by opening the cabin door at 35,000 feet?
At first, I thought this might be a terrorist attack or something along those lines, because the first report I read (The Washington Post) carefully took pains not to identify the attacker by name, nationality, race, religion or ethnicity. Knowing, to a certain extent how the media typically covers these things, I thought "must be a Muslim" right away, because experience tells that if he was a Heterosexual- Middle-Class-White-Christian-Male, the Post would have quickly published a photo, his name and address, talked to half his neighbors and employer,identified his wife and kids, and then implied some sort of ties to a bizarre White-Supremacist-Pat Robertson-Branch Davidian-Klan-inspired-Doomsday-Cult terror plot, all within 10 minutes.
Because only white, Bible-Thumpin' rednecks can be terrorists, you know...
But credit to the Post, they did no such thing. You know others would have.
Anyways, it turns out the guy apparently is white, and there's even a photo. You can see it here, along with another report on the incident.
But, this brings us back, once again, to the issue of security in airports and airliners. Once again, it is the passengers who have to risk life and limb to prevent a tragedy. I'm not saying that anyone is supposed to be psychic and somehow "know" when some lone lunatic is going to pull a stunt like this, but sheesh, I wonder if there wasn't some sort of warning sign when this guy was still on the ground that someone just didn't pick up on?
The airline industry is slowly being destroyed, one incident (terror-related or not) at at time.
In the meantime, The Post also begins to ask if the Obama Administration's obsession with civilian criminal trials for terrorists means they're missing the forest for the trees.
But, perhaps that's just the obvious result of having a Justice Department stocked with lawyers who used to defend terrorists for a living...?
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