I first heard about the incident with the JetBlue flight attendant up in JFK on Monday when it happened. For those of you who missed it, flight attendant Steven Slater, fed up from his interaction with an irate passenger, announced his dissatisfaction over the cabin intercom, grabbed a beer from the galley, and then blew the emergency-evacuation slide to exit the plane. He was arrested and charged with felonies but has also managed to gain folk-hero status with thousands of people.
I spent a few years working in the airline industry with some of that being in direct customer service positions. I know full well that some passengers out there are clueless, classless people. (A businessman who spent 5 minutes screaming at me to “bring the f*&@ing plane back” after he had deliberately stepped away from the gate moments before departure time to make a phone call and the lady who ranted at me about our owing her an on-time departure – in the middle of a driving thunderstorm – are cases that come to mind.) And we’ve all had our fantasy moments thinking about grand “take this job and shove it” gestures that would leave astonished and humiliated bosses in our wake as we get away clean. What this idiot male stewardess did stepped way over the line and no one should be applauding him.
The issue that got the ball rolling was an irate passenger, remember? What was she mad about? Allowed to proceed to the gate with a carry-on bag, she was told at some point during the boarding process that they didn’t have room for the bag in the cabin. Now, I don’t know what was in the bag but it was clearly stuff she didn’t want to risk having miss the flight or get lost by ramp workers who are, these days, notorious for not giving too much of a damn when or whether the bags make it back to their owners. Maybe the bag was too big for the overhead bins, but more likely it was because there were already too many bags in the bins when the lady got on the plane. This is something I’ve had happen to me a few times in the last 6 months. The people who get the 1st or 2nd boarding groups are the guys walking on with the stuffed garment bag and the roll-on bag that’s 3 millimeters under the maximum size allowed. These guys always get their bags on board leaving those of us stuck in the last boarding group to deal with gate-checked bags. Those bags are supposed to be brought up to the jetway immediately. In this instance, “immediately” was apparently not as immediate as the passenger wanted. How fast was it, really? We don’t know. If the reports are true, however, she was cussing at Slater and I certainly don’t approve of that. Regardless, cussing isn’t inherently dangerous to someone and it’s certainly not illegal (outside of Michigan, I think.)
Slater decided this woman had given him all he could stand and so he decided to make a grand exit. Had he picked up the cabin microphone and said his piece, walked out the door and out of the airport, you could make the argument to me that what he did was cool. I might have considered that over the top, I might not. But that’s not where this ended. Slater grabbed a beer from the galley on his way out. That’s a beer he didn’t pay for nor was it his. There’s a word for that: theft. To those people lauding his actions, I have to ask: if he’d grabbed the beer from the cooler at the local 7-11 and walked out without paying, would you still be applauding? Or would you call him what he is, a shoplifter?
What he did next was far more dangerous and destructive than what’s being reported. He blew the evac slide on the side of the plane not attached to the jetway. (How do I know which slide? He was clearly up front where the passengers were deplaning because he was being berated by the woman awaiting her bag and you can’t blow the slide on a door that was already disarmed and open, which is the one the jetway would be attached to.) Now, just a quick note before I move to the really serious part. The evac slides are extremely expensive pieces of gear. They are made to never fail because when you need them, you need them to work correctly, instantly, every time. Engineering tolerances like that can be achieved but it ain’t cheap. They’re also not what you’d call reusable. Oh, I imagine they could be repacked but you should be thinking of them like you do your car’s air bags. Once they’ve been fired, they’re replaced completely. This clown just deployed one so he could have a happy slide off the airplane and that’s thousands of dollars in what amounts to vandalism done in an instant. We could also make the argument that he deliberately circumvented the airport’s security because once he hit the slide there was nothing standing between the passengers and the secure area of the ramp. It’s a minor point but it’s still there.
But the real issue with this is the danger he placed all of the ground team in while performing this stunt. JetBlue uses 2 aircraft types, the Airbus 320 and the Embraer 190. Both are twin engine jets roughly the same configuration as the well-known Boeing 737. The passenger door thresholds are about 10 feet above the ramp when the plane is on the ground, well above the normal plane of awareness of the average ramp worker who is generally far more concerned with the ground support gear (bag tugs, lavatory carts, etc.) and the engines of the aircraft around them. To have a door not associated with the normal ground ops suddenly pop open and a slide weighing hundreds of pounds deploy with thousands of pounds of pressure literally above their heads is a major issue. Prosecutors are making this exact point in their case:
Prosecutors said Slater’s actions could have been deadly if ground crew workers had been hit by the emergency slide, which deploys with a force of 3,000 pounds per square inch. Turman said Slater had opened the hatch and made sure no one was in the slide’s path before deploying it.
Turman is Slater’s lawyer. Typically, he’s shooting his mouth off without knowing what he’s talking about. Evac slides are attached to the bottom of the door and an anchor bar to the base of the slide is placed in attach points on the threshold of the galley floor to keep it firmly attached to the plane when in use. When this is done, the door is considered “armed.” The deployment method is for the crewmember to open the door without pulling that bar out of the attach points. When the door breaks the seal around the frame and moves just a bit, the expansion cartridge inflates the slide very quickly and with those thousands of pounds of pressure I mentioned before. That action literally throws the door the rest of the way open. Accidental deployments have been recorded where gate agents waiting on the other side of that door after having driven the jetway into position have been injured when the door literally slaps them back up the jetway. The key is this: in order to open the door safely, the slide must be disarmed. When the door is then opened, the slide is completely out of reach of the crew member because it’s hanging on the bottom of the door which is now laying flat along the outside of the plane. You cannot open the door first and then deploy the slide. That’s just not how the device is engineered. Slater opened that door with the slide armed, which means he absolutely did not “[open] the hatch and [make] sure no one was in the slide’s path” before the slide deployed.
Now, there’s a little 4-inch window in the door that’s used to determine if something is immediately outside the door before you open it. Slater and his lawyer might say they meant to say he looked out that window before deploying the slide. That window is used to check to see if there’s a jetway in place or, in an emergency, to determine whether you’re about to open the cabin door into a raging jetfuel fire. It’s got a massively-distorting fisheye effect when you’re looking through it, making it completely unsuitable to see whether there’s a ramp agent directly under the door.
Bottom line: Slater just popped that slide without a second thought for whomever he was putting in danger. Had there been someone there, they would – at best – have been severely injured. Likely killed. And Slater would have slid right over them on his way to his own personal Miller time. “Reckless” is the nicest thing you can call that. This man doesn’t deserve to be held up as some kind of working-stiff hero. He’s a thoughtless jerk, a clueless menace. He clearly felt he was too good to be yelled at by someone whose opinion he shouldn’t have given a crap about and that air of offended entitlement placed other JetBlue employees at risk. He’s guilty of the crimes he’s accused of and he should be convicted on that fact alone. After paying the fines to the Court and restitution to JetBlue, after attending the anger-management classes he clearly needs, perhaps we can trade his time in jail with time spent providing some kind of service to the community. I’m thinking roadway cleanup on the roads leading into the airport or perhaps tasking him with carrying any gate-checked baggage from the ramp up to the jetways.
August 11th, 2010
Posted by
ricjames |
Aviation, Crime & Punishment, Human Interest |
2 comments
The Constitution directs the federal government to undertake a census of the population of the United States every 10 years and does so for a very specific purpose: to determine the number of representatives in the House that each state shall have seated. To deliberately skew that census count is to over- or under-represent citizens from a given state. An investigation has revealed that 2 managers of a Census Bureau in New York have literally made up responses for 10,000 households in their assigned area in order to meet deadlines they were going to blow past.
Two Census Bureau managers from a Brooklyn field office were fired after their bosses found they faked household surveys to meet deadlines, the Daily News learned.
Instead of pounding the pavement and knocking on doors, the corner-cutting people-counters mined the phone book and Internet to make up answers to questionnaires, regional director Tony Farthing said.
The managers – turned in by whistleblower employees – were caught last week. Now, at least 10,000 surveys need to be done or redone, officials said.
That’s at least 10,000 households misreported. People might be counted as residents of New York when they are no longer living there – or living at all – or the count might be under-reported because they only counted, say, 1 person living at an address when a family of 5 lives there now. These 2 clowns have taken it upon themselves to skew the representation of the State of New York in Congress because they were unable to get the job done in the time allotted. If that’s not a felony, it should be. Either way, these 2 should be barred from ever working for the federal government for as long they live.
June 26th, 2010
Posted by
ricjames |
Crime & Punishment, Human Interest, Politics |
no comments
On election day in 2008 members of the Black Panthers, dressed in what appeared to be nearly tactical garb and waving clubs in their hands, confronted voters heading to a particular polling location in Philadelphia. They made comments to those people heading into the polls that several voters called threatening and generally made a show of intimidation. Complaints were made, charges were filed, and the Justice Department even won a default judgment against the Black Panthers. And then, inexplicably, the DoJ dropped most of the charges. Like many of us, Virginia’s own Congressman Wolf wanted to know why. He’s been asking ever since and the DoJ as well as Obama’s AG Eric Holder have been doing everything they can to not answer. Wolf’s not giving up.
Mr. Wolf is not about to back down. “If showing a weapon, making threatening statements and wearing paramilitary uniforms in front of a polling station do not constitute voter intimidation, at what threshold of activity would these laws be enforceable?” he asked, getting to the heart of the matter. Important questions also remain unanswered about original Black Panther defendant Jerry Jackson, who was a member of the local executive committee of the Philadelphia Democratic Party. Dismissal of the case against him came four days before another election in which, again, he served as an official poll watcher.
In what was supposedly going to be the most open and transparent government ever, this is perhaps the most egregious example of stonewalling and evasion. There is no reasonable person out there who would look at these actions and not justifiably suspect that the charges were dropped solely because the Black Panthers supported Obama’s election. The Democrats screamed about voter intimidation and election fraud during the 2000 and 2004 elections with no evidence of either taking place. This incident was well documented and the evidence clear enough to have initially won the judgment but these people are being allowed to get away with it. They’re being assisted in getting away with it by the very department tasked with enforcing our laws. Those complicit in this are no friends of America and do not deserve the defense of silence. Congressman Wolf is pressing ahead and will not back down on this. As a Virginian in his district, I’m quite proud of that. Congressman Wolf has Eric Holder on the run. What we all need is for AG Holder to stop running and start being honest.
June 12th, 2010
Posted by
ricjames |
Crime & Punishment, Law, Politics |
no comments
Another challenge to Arizona’s enforcement law has been laid down, this time directly addressing the notion that immigrations law and enforcement are duties that fall to the federal government and not the states.
In their 44 page filing, the plaintiffs call the law an “unprecedented attempt by a single state to regulate immigration” and “a brazen and improper usurpation of the federal government’s constitutional role in immigration regulation.” Of greater importance to their injunction request, the groups argue the law, if it takes effect on July 29, will cause irreparable harm and will immediately cause their members to change their lives “out of fear that they will be subject to unlawful questioning, arrest, or detention.”
I would contend that it’s “unprecedented” because the states were waiting for the federal government to step up to their duties and it has failed miserably to do so. Seeing that lack of action and noting the high degree of certainty of that lack of action continuing, states that are bearing the brunt of the federal government’s failure to address the situation have no choice but to step in and do it themselves. The fact that the states have reached the end of their patience in having to tolerate the negligence of the federal government in matters of border security and enforcement more than justifies taking action that happens to lack a precedent.
More to the point, however, this law isn’t “regulat[ing] immigration.” The law does not address the process of immigration in any way for a very simple reason: the process of immigration remains exactly was it was before this law was passed and remains the domain of the federal government. What this law is doing is requiring that any foreign person wishing to come to or remain in Arizona must abide by federal immigration law and be able to prove they are doing so. All of this overheated rhetoric about Nazi states and “papers please” approaches conveniently ignores that federal law already requires alien residents to carry those documents and to show them on demand to the authorities. Arizona is usurping nothing regarding the regulation of immigration. Immigrants in compliance with the law – including the part about carrying the already federally-required documents – will not be required to do a single thing more than they already are doing. Those immigrants who aren’t are in violation of the law and that’s what law enforcement personnel are supposed to be catching.
People who are in this country illegally aren’t immigrants. They’re illegal aliens. The fact that they’re here at all is a violation of our laws – see that word “illegal”? – and the people of Arizona are completely within their rights to want criminals in violation of the law to be caught and to suffer the consequences of that violation. And, once again, that’s what “law enforcement” is for.
This challenge is yet another smokescreen, an attempt at a lawyerly sleight-of-hand. The injunction should be denied and, I would hope, the entire challenge ruled uncompelling and set aside.
June 6th, 2010
Posted by
ricjames |
Crime & Punishment, Immigration, Law, Politics |
no comments
The guy who hacked then-VP candidate Sarah Palin’s personal e-mail account was convicted Friday of 2 of the 4 charges filed against him, computer fraud and obstruction of justice. To which I say: excellent. Now, sentence him quickly, toss him in jail and let him fade into obscurity.
During the 2008 election cycle David Kendall of Tennessee hacked into Palin’s e-mail and published content from it. Various news outlets and lefty blogs tried everything they could to make this situation all about Palin herself instead of the criminal act perpetrated by Kendall but, fortunately, they failed. As I said when Kendall was convicted, this was neither a situation of a kid doing a childish prank nor was it a heroic whistle-blower trying to uncover a public official using private e-mail to hid her professional dealings away from FOIA laws. It was a man targeting an opposing political figure and dismissively breaking the law to attempt to dig up dirt. That failed on him both ways and now a jury has made it official. Good for them.
May 1st, 2010
Posted by
ricjames |
2008 Presidential Race, Crime & Punishment, Politics, Technology |
no comments
I have driven cars since I turned 16, roughly (*cough* *cough*) years ago and I’ve driven everything from subcompacts to 2-ton delivery vans. (Interesting note – as a temp worker with the US Postal Service years ago, I’ve even driven cars from the “wrong” side of the car!) I’ve had brake failures, blown tires, transmission failures, tie rod breakages, electrical failures, overheats, blown fuses, etc., etc, etc. And yes, I had a carburetor failure that stuck open the gas flow in an old postal vehicle that made it impossible to “let up off the gas.”
I have never had the gas, the brake, and the transmission fail at the same time. And that’s what would have to happen for a car to go runaway with you and you be unable to stop it for miles.
In the 1 case of gas pedal stickage (and it was actually the linkage in the carb that was sticking, truth be told) I stomped on the crappy brakes that those postal jeeps had and they stopped the little beast immediately. I then turned the engine off and put it in park. The grand total time of the event was 15 seconds. In fact, it was probably less since I’m sure it seemed longer than it was.
There have been people die from these events getting a lot of press time, of that I have no doubts, and those deaths are tragic. But every test performed by every agency that has allowed the results to be independently verified has shown that the braking system on virtually every car being sold today can more than easily out-muscle the engine in the car and can bring the vehicle to a stop under the driver’s control. That is assuming, of course, that the driver actually retains the presence of mind to do these things.
Or that the driver actually wants to do these things.
Witness the story of James Sikes of California who, he says, was the victim of a runaway 2008 Toyota Prius. The Prius managed to get up to 90 miles per hour over the course of the event, zipping down I-8 near San Diego, and would not stop with Sikes stomping on the brakes the whole time.
Only, apparently, he didn’t, according to investigators. The brake pads in the car would show it if a 90-mph stop were attempted over that period of time and they don’t. Ergo, he didn’t. In spite of the pleas of the 911-operators to shift the car into neutral so he could make a controlled stop on the side of the road, he didn’t. In spite of the pleas of those same operators to turn off the car, he didn’t. He didn’t shift the car into neutral because, he said, he was afraid it might flip the car over. (Ludicrous.) He also says he didn’t want to take his hands off the wheel. (You know, like he was already doing while he was talking on the phone to the operators.) Micheal Fumento at Forbes goes into far more detail on this and explores the actions of the press who ate up every nugget of this ridiculous spew.
The investigations thus far have shown that the victims of these “runaways” are all older drivers – 55 and up with the vast majority being over 60. Now, if this were really an issue with the cars and not the drivers, the ages of the drivers would be all over the map. They’re not. This isn’t a problem with the vehicle. It’s pilot error. And the press isn’t being very informative about that. The stories do not pass the smell test and I’m suspicious of the press’ lack of interest in getting at the truth.
March 14th, 2010
Posted by
ricjames |
Crime & Punishment, Economy, Human Interest, Politics, Technology, The Media |
3 comments
Good news:
Homicides in Washington hit a 43-year low in 2009.
Police say the nation’s capital recorded 143 slayings in 2009, the fewest since 1966. Police had hoped to achieve the lowest total since 1964, when there were 132, but there were three slayings on New Year’s Eve.
The homicide total represents a 23 percent drop from 2008.
Metropolitan Police also closed 75 percent of murder cases, the second year in a row closed cases topped 70 percent.
That’s a long way from being the “murder capital” of the country and that’s an achievement everyone can applaud.
January 1st, 2010
Posted by
ricjames |
Crime & Punishment, Human Interest |
no comments
Advocates of gun control talk of the concept of crime increasing as more people have guns as if it’s a graven-in-stone axiom. Evidence has been presented in many localities that suggest otherwise and now the FBI’s nationwide crime report for the 1st half of 2009 shows definitively that this concept is untrue. From the NRA-ILA:
Last week, the FBI issued its preliminary 2009 crime report, showing that the number of murders in the first half of 2009 decreased 10 percent compared to the first half of 2008. If the trend holds for the remainder of 2009, it will be the single greatest one-year decrease in the number of murders since at least 1960, the earliest year for which national data are available through the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Also, the per capita murder rate for 2009 will be 51 percent lower than the all-time high recorded in 1991, and it will be the lowest rate since 1963—a 46-year low. Final figures for 2009 will be released by the FBI next year.
There can be reasoned debate about the natures of the causes and effects listed in the report but the numbers are clear on this: gun ownership went way up in the 1st half of 2009 and crime went way down. “More guns means more crime” is a fallacy, period.
I contend that more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens means criminals face a much higher risk-to-reward ratio when deciding to commit crimes against their neighbors and it is that change in the calculus that’s driving criminal behavior downward. That’s an educated guess and it accounts for the effects but there’s no denying that increased guns do not equate to increased crime. I look forward to seeing the report for the remainder of 2009 when it comes out.
December 31st, 2009
Posted by
ricjames |
2nd Amendment, Crime & Punishment, Politics |
2 comments
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