Just found an interesting blog on the Net by Patrick Smith, who must be an airline pilot but he did not identify his airlines and he is reported to be a columnist on air travel for commercial pilots on Salon’s blog.
He describes an incident at the JFK airport when a gentleman made a mistake and opened an emergency exit.
On Saturday, 57-year-old Jules Paul Bouloute opened an emergency exit inside the American Airlines terminal at Kennedy airport and alarms blared and sirens flashed. Bouloute later told police that he’d opened the door by accident and was really sorry.
Smith says that the local media and officials, in all possible gravity, keep describing the incident as a “security breach” and Bouloute faces charges.
Smith then asks: “Not to harp on semantics, but am I the only person who finds this silly? Emergency door opening and other false alarms happen all the time.”
Unfortunately, the response at JFK was neither rational nor surprising when all of JFK Terminal 8 was evacuated for more than two hours. Police then swept through the building with dogs and SWAT teams because, possibly, a terrorist wouldn’t quietly drop an explosive device into a trash barrel; he would first set off alarms. Before being allowed back in, thousands of travelers were forced to undergo rescreening at the Transportation Security Administration checkpoints and inbound planes were stranded on the tarmac and departures were delayed for several hours.
If our readers did not know, this was the third incident at New York airports in recent weeks in which transgressions resulted in chaos and evacuations.
Does anyone understand what “overreacted” means?
Come on America – get a grip!
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If this is a case in which a relatively minor incident triggers a pre-planned response that gets implemented automatically then do we have the situation where someone can take advantage of the pre-planning and the chaos it always brings as a diversion to implement a much more serious attack elsewhere?