If you're not terrified by the story I wrote earlier, read this one

Jeez. I just read probably the most terrifying article I have read probably ever. It makes me think of how laissez-faire I've been about flying for a long time, and now I'm a little freaked out. I don't know how I would have responded to the situation described in this woman's narrative. The article is a little long, and reading it aloud to my sister, I felt choked up a few times and had to take a moment. Read it yourself and see what you think. And be prepared for a sick feeling in your stomach all day.


UPDATE: I had a conversation with the hubby about this at lunch and we both were skeptical. I mean, why in the world would an incident like this happen and major news media NOT pick it up? We have every news outlet scrambling for stories, and the biggest news right now is the DNConvention, and this would be huge. The magazine where this was first published has links to other articles that have followed up on the story of a flight where a reporter felt herself to possibly be on "the next 9/11" and there are interesting facts coming up. I asked my friend the pilot if he'd ever heard of this kind of situation happening, been briefed about it. And he said that yes, in a training video, this sort of situation was covered, but that there wasn't really a specific briefing on a recent incident.

What I think the entire thing shows is that fear and paranoia are working against another sort of fear and paranoia-- we're afraid that we're racist, and afraid that we're paranoid, and we're also afraid that there might be a good reason to be afraid. It's difficult stuff to deal with. Jacobson's second discussion of this incident speculates more on this, too.

I was getting on a flight out of Salt Lake City when a man complained loudly that they weren't letting him take 3 carryon pieces, and he claimed he had been doing so for several flights and was mad that the woman at SLC was NOT letting him continue breaking the rules. He seemed to think that they were targeting him-- and yes, he was perhaps Indian (that's what his accent sounded like to me, and I know a few Indian folks, so I think I may have been right). He said loudly that he was writing a letter. And I thought, as some of these articles that are the followup to Annie Jacobsen's on Women's Wall Street have pointed out, that if the guy had been any other ethnicity, perhaps a big blond German guy, we would have all just thought "what a jerk."

I also remembered one day when I was being bumped from a flight and the guy who had missed the flight that had just left was rude to the gate agents and they said they were "attaching a note" to his record. He sounded a lot like a Cajun (someone from Louisiana). Does ethnicity have to matter or does just plain "being rude" cover it? Does someone who is that rude indeed "get a note attached?" Rude is different from scary. But it's all really terrifying, and I am definitely afraid that our illusion of safety is just that: an illusion. but fear is definitely amuck. And the biggest fear is definitely that we are out of control of our own fates. And mostly, we are. But as said pilot friend of mine also pointed out, it would be far easier to blow up, say, a shopping mall, or a movie theater, or a ..... you enter unsecured place with lots of people here. This is something that is unfortunately now a part of our lives. And if some folks obsess over it, then maybe some aren't worried enough about it. Remember the guy who got all that stuff aboard a Southwest Airlines Flight? He was just pointing out breaches in security.

I don't mean to fear monger or anything. But it still makes me a wee bit sad that we feel we have to worry about these issues, and suspicious that some people who are declaring Jacobson a bigot for being afraid are doing so because they "doth protest too much" and have been afraid themselves.