I'm worried that a flight crew responsible for moving a million-lb plane safely through the air isn't allowed (or is unwilling) to perform basic triage on accusations made by terrified passengers.
Has there been a single useful observation of an actual incident by passengers, since Richard Reid (who was blatantly attempting to light something on fire)? Any arrests, charges?
I struggle to understand why vague accusations of "suspicious behavior" are treated this way, over and over again.
I think the attempted underwear bomber was after Reid. Here's the thing though: if you're trying to set something on fire or storm the cockpit or some other actually undesired behavior, it's not going to be some routine in an airline manual that stops you. It's going to be all your seat neighbors who are going to physically stop you because you're obviously a threat.
The real problem is these wildly unqualified citizen-Paul(ine)-Blarts who saw on an episode of Criminal Minds that looking up and left while writing non-ASCII characters is an indicator of terrorist intent. She essentially pulled the fire alarm on a bunch of people because she's an idiot. What she did is functionally no different than calling in a false report about some random passenger on a plane that's about to take off. She should have to pay a fine for all the time and resources she wasted with her little ruse (I'm sure she felt very clever when she conceived it).
Imagine a Richard Reid scenario where some guy beats the piss out of his seat neighbor because he thinks he's trying to bomb the flight. If he's right, he's a hero (and he should be applauded for stopping a bombing). If he's wrong and the guy was just tying his shoes, he gets charged with assault. This is a good thing, because we don't want people seeing physical violence as a cost free option.
Being too dumb to tell the difference between an episode of 24 and your boring ass day is not a tolerated excuse to physically assault people. It shouldn't be tolerated as a reason to call in false alarms either. I'm sick of stupid people being able to inflict massive amounts of inconvenience and even degrees of suffering with no consequences for being wrong.
* I realize that stupid is perhaps an imprecise and mean choice of words, but I can't come up with a better explanation for adults who cannot appropriately assess the threat posed by a nerdy Italian guy writing in a notebook who doesn't want to talk to them. I get that calling people stupid isn't a way to make them smarter, and that it can have a negative developmental impact for younger kids to view things in a smart/stupid fixed-talent paradigm, but we need to somehow bring back some of the cultural rejection for acting like a goddamn idiot. I don't really care if she gets smarter (though that would be nice), I have lower aims. I want her to be afraid to be wrong because actions should have consequences. If there's no cost incurred to this person (actually, she'll probably be praised for her "vigilance" by people she respects) where do we draw the line?
