News notes from around the interweb:
- Woman dates a really bad guy. Relationship goes bad, he behaves deplorably. And United owes her $321,000. You see, she was a flight attendant and he was a pilot and so his post-breakup bad deeds are workplace harassment.
- Puerto Rico is getting a bunch of new flights on Spirit
- French fighter jets broke the sound barrier to intercept United’s Barcelona – Newark flight
- LAX rideshare lot buses caught fire leading to hours of traffic delays at the airport.
Three passenger busses at @flyLAXairport on fire. Rescue units on the way. Fire 🔥 ball and smoke filling nighy sky. pic.twitter.com/Gj4zi6KmGC
— Juan Fernandez (@NewsJuan) December 22, 2019
- Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary’s Love, Actually Christmas video to employees
What a poor description of the first link. A more evenhanded explanation:
“Eventually, the victim approached United Airlines for help… United failed to take appropriate preventative or corrective action …a second complaint was made by a second flight attendant years after … [United captain[ was eventually stopped in 2015 when the FBI arrested and charged him with stalking…United Airlines has also agreed to revise its sexual harassment policies explicitly to include harassing conduct perpetrated through the internet.”
I was attracted to the headline Fighter Jets Intercept United’s Barcelona Flight. Why would they I wondered. But after reading that it was due to the flight not responding, I find that interesting and impressive that we can respond in such a way to such an event. Getting safer I suppose:)
Were those French pilots really prepared to kill everyone on board? As Gary had said before, news coverage of fighter jet escorts often glosses over the fact that they really only have one mission goal when they’re sent out to an unresponsive jet.
“As Gary had said before, news coverage of fighter jet escorts often glosses over the fact that they really only have one mission goal when they’re sent out to an unresponsive jet.” Umm their mission goal is to find out what is going on with the jet and report the status. Their primary mission is certainly not to kill everyone on board. That is pretty much a worst case scenario, although the media tries to sensationalize this stuff. There can be any number of non-terrorism reasons for a loss of communication.
Has Gary asked United to comment on this incident?
Actually noticed 3 more suspicious air safety related incidents on the same day with no mention of resolving source of problem like access to plane , security misses…
@Michael – “Were those French pilots really prepared to kill everyone on board?”
I sure as hell hope they were prepared to do that, if necessary.
Bill/Michael:. I totally agree. These clickbait titles have just made me decide to block any “news” bulletins from this website. Military jets are regularly sent to intercept aircraft that are not responding to radio communications. They just want to make sure everything is okay. Occasionally, it turns out to be tragic: loss of pressurization or carbon monoxide poisoning incapacitates the crew and passengers. Usually it’s just a problem with radios. I highly recommend watching Mentour Pilot on YouTube. He’s a much better source for information like this (he’s an airline pilot) – he has at least one video on exactly what happens in one of these situations, and how both the intercepting and intercepted pilots are expected to behave in such a situation. After the 9/11 attacks, all of us in the north American pilot community were strongly encouraged to brush up on how you are supposed to behave when intercepted. Both the FAA and NAVCanada, along with the AOPA, and COPA did videos and seminars to make sure we really understood what to do, since it tends to be the kind of thing that you memorize for the written skills test and then promptly forget about. There’s a lot more emphasis on it these days.