[Infowarrior] - Flying the paranoid skies

[Richard Forno]

Flying the paranoid skies
When an iPod fell into a toilet on my flight to Ottawa this week,
authorities took no chances with such a perilous situation
 http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/opinion/story.html?id=1c0072fe-4d9
8-44e4-8414-652f83e27868
Amy Knight
Citizen Special

Friday, August 18, 2006

When the pilot on my Ottawa-bound United flight from Chicago last Tuesday
came on the intercom to report a problem, I felt a trickle of panic, even
though he assured us that there was no cause for alarm. They had discovered,
he said awkwardly, an object on the plane that should not be there. He had
notified the authorities at Ottawa airport, and they would handle the
problem upon our arrival.

A few nervous minutes later, at around 4 p.m., we landed and taxied to a
desolate spot far from the terminal. I and my fellow passengers (close to 50
of us) expected to see emergency vehicles waiting and a crew of people to
rush us off the plane before this "object" exploded. No such luck. We were
greeted by an eerie silence, a silence that lasted almost 40 minutes until a
bus finally pulled up near our plane.

Perplexed and confused, we were ordered to disembark and told that we could
bring nothing with us, not even our passports. (Apparently this order was a
mistake because we were expected later to have our identifying documents
with us.) Grim-faced police officers with guns stared at us with accusing
glances as we staggered down the steps. I felt the impulse to put my hands
up. What had we done wrong? Were we suspected of terrorism?

We were transported to a large garage, filled with armed police, on the
airport complex and told that we had a long wait ahead of us. This turned
out to be true. It would be four hours from our arrival at Ottawa before we
were finally released.

Meanwhile, the word had gotten out. The "object" that had caused all this
panic was an iPod that slipped off the belt of a young man (who looked to be
about 18) when he was using the bathroom. It landed in the toilet. Knowing
that his iPod was ruined and apparently reluctant to put his hands in the
toilet, the young man tried unsuccessfully to flush it away and returned to
his seat. When another passenger saw the iPod and mentioned it to the flight
attendant, she immediately told the captain, who then notified Ottawa
airport authorities.

Once the young man realized that his unflushed iPod was causing such concern
he went up to the attendant and told her what had happened. But it was too
late. The call to Ottawa airport had set a process in motion that could not
be stopped. The Ottawa police, who were in charge of Operation iPod, had a
protocol to follow and they were not to be deterred.

We were ordered to stand in line to be questioned by police and immigration
officers, a process that, complicated by the lack of identifying documents,
seemed endless. When a few us of grumbled, a policeman shouted out to us
that ours was a serious situation and might somehow be connected to an
explosives scare that had just occurred on a Los Angeles-bound plane.

As in our case, the cause of the Los Angeles airport scare turned out to be
a completely harmless item -- a toy found by a flight attendant on an Alaska
Airlines plane that none of the passengers claimed. But, in contrast to our
situation, the passengers at LAX were evacuated from the airplane
immediately upon landing.

It was a good thing that the object of concern at Ottawa airport was only a
drenched iPod and not an explosive that could have blown up the plane on the
tarmac. The suspicious item apparently remained on board until after the
police had finished interrogating the hapless iPod owner and various other
passengers who had in some way implicated themselves in the incident.

Meanwhile, we were ordered, one by one, back on the bus to await our fate.

The stress started to take its toll. One young woman, pregnant with her
first child, burst into tears. She had travelled a long way for a family
reunion and now she was missing the whole thing. A two-year-old girl, who
had been delightfully cheerful and well behaved throughout the ordeal, fell
from her seat and hit her head so badly she had to be examined by
paramedics. People who had missed flights going out of Ottawa were wondering
where they were going to spend the night. Others worried about family and
friends who had been waiting for them at the terminal for hours.

Finally, at 8 p.m., after being given our belongings from the plane's cabin,
we were bussed, exhausted and shaken, to the terminal to collect our baggage
and proceed through customs.

Someone on the bus muttered "Well, I guess they had no choice but to play it
safe."

I found myself wondering whether "playing it safe" in dealing with airplane
incidents is not being taken too far. And if, in the end, such responses to
inevitable lapses on the part of the passengers (a dropped iPod, a forgotten
toy or cellphone) are not doing us more harm than good.

Even if we forget about the stress and discomfort caused to passengers,
inflexible overreactions to airplane "incidents" are a drain of money and
resources, which might better be spent on figuring out ways to deal more
effectively and consistently with real threats to our security.

Judging from my experience last Tuesday, there is a lot of room for
improvement in the system of airport emergency response.

Former Carleton professor Amy Knight is the author of How the Cold War
Began. She now lives in Switzerland.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2006