Come on. Continental US North American Aerospace Defense Command Region (NORAD) is going overboard on escorting diverted airliners to airports. What in the world can they possibly add to the security equation except the chance for a horribly catastrophic error?
Last week Hawaiian Airlines Flight 39 to Hawaii with an “unruly passenger” returned to Portland, Oregon, escorted by two fighter jets. Then a drunk locked himself in the bathroom of AirTran Airways flight 39 flying between San Francisco and Atlanta. The pilot diverted to Colorado Springs to extricate the besotted passenger. It was escorted by two jets as well.
Please tell me the need for sending jets up to escort flights to diverted landings?
The pilot is certainly in charge of the plane. There has been no breach of the cockpit door. There is no danger of the plane hurtling like a missile into the Rocky Mountains, a Colorado Springs highrise, a Portland brewery or other landmark.
Isn’t the purpose of a fighter escort to shoot the plane down with its hundreds of passengers before it can be used to strike a target on the ground like the Boeing 767s struck the World Trade Center on 9/11? If anyone contemplated shooting down a loaded 737 in this case, they need heads examined.
What provoked the captain of the Hawaiian Airlines flight to return to Portland? It turned out to be a humorous musing about crashing on a tropical island, a la Gilligan’s Island. The passenger wrote it on a comment card. Sealed it and gave it to the flight attendant. Since the envelope was addressed to the airline headquarters, the passenger thought it would be opened later at company headquarters. Wrong. The flight attendants immediately opened the sealed envelope and handed it to the pilot who panicked.
Didn’t he ever watch Gilligan’s Island? Here’s the actually note and a transcript.
“I thought I was going to die, we were so high up. I thought to myself: I hope we don’t crash and burn or worse yet landing in the ocean, living through it, only to be eaten by sharks, or worse yet, end up on some place like Gilligan’s Island, stranded, or worse yet, be eaten by a tribe of headhunters, speaking of headhunters, why do they just eat outsiders, and not the family members? Strange … and what if the plane ripped apart in mid-flight and we plumited (sic) to earth, landed on Gilligan’s Island and then lived through it, and the only woman there was Mrs. Thurston Howell III? No Mary Anne (my favorite) no Ginger, just Lovey! If it were just her, I think I’d opt for the sharks, maybe the headhunters.”
In the case of the AirTran flight somewhere over the Rocky Mountains, a drunk passed out on the bathroom certainly doesn’t require fighter escorts.
i don’t even want to add up the costs of scrambling these four jet fighters. However, if there were already up in the sky turning training circles in the air, perhaps there is some training value to the escapade.
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
