News and notes from around the interweb:
- Man flying Southwest with daughter and friend gets profiled as human trafficker.
Airline and hotel employees are taught to use their prejudices to spot and report human trafficking, and this often works out badly. Flight attendants are told they need to be on the lookout, and you have to sympathize with the position that puts them in.
Imagine if they didn’t say something when they could have stopped a bad situation? That would haunt them. So better to raise the accusation or flag innocent people for law enforcement to sort out.
- American Airlines to offer largest-ever schedule to Italy in 2025
But…
A handful of decreases though. Right now no 2nd daily DFW-FCO, JFK-FCO next summer. One less daily LAX-LHR and ORD-LHR.
ORD-VCE seems to be dropped since they don’t mention it in the press release, moving it to DFW-VCE
— Ishrion Aviation (@IshrionA) November 1, 2024
I hate that airline route press releases always try to frame it as net adds and never say how the routes are being funded.
- It’s a lot more than ‘D0’ that matters.
Interesting: @united’s on-time departures (D:00) stat for October was 75.2%, but when they remove purposely delayed departures due to Connection Saver it jumps slightly to 77.6%.
“In the month of October, we saved nearly 54,000 customer connections using Connection Saver.”
— Jason Rabinowitz (@AirlineFlyer) November 1, 2024
- “If you could fill the room with pictures of hand drawn stick figures at crucial events in American history I would appreciate”
- Two years ago Singapore had to drop Dom Perignon from first class because Emirates did a deal for exclusivity, but now Lufthansa serves Dom. Relatedly, Singapore Airlines brings back Charles Heidsieck Blanc des Millénaires in First Class.
- He’s missing out on great rates, though.
Poor man is traumatized by PenFed
byu/prymalism inunitedairlines
I honestly think this kinda thing is Absolutely Dispicable and I can’t imagine any airlines company pulling such Shady profilling on travellers and the reason I say this is because I could surely see something like this blowing up in there faces
When airlines do policing actions that have nothing to do with airline operations, they need to get sued until they start behaving correctly. How many real trafficking situations have they stopped, anyway?
I’m agreed with @Robin and @jns: This is wholly inappropriate for unskilled FA’s to be reporting, unfair to both them and the PAX involved. What should happen instead is to migrate this to the Security Checkpoint, where you have both TSA Staff and Armed Officers. It wouldn’t be too difficult for them to set up a standard protocol, with higher ID success rates and lower stress for the innocent.
They are NOT taught to use their prejudices. They are taught to look for warning signs. l think Gary, who keeps posting this stuff, is either unaware of human trafficking or indifferent to it. False positives will happen. That’s better than false negatives which will lead to a life of unspeakable horror for someone.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38880612
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBZU85DTD1U
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/human-trafficking-american-airlines/
We almost never hear of successful human trafficking interdictions. One would think we would at least hear of as many positives as negatives. I understand some of them may be suppressed to prevent the minors from being identified, but nearly none?
My daughter was getting questioned about how old she was by Clear, in what seemed to be a human trafficking line of questioning. She was 29 at the time, but looked 18, and was travelling with her then fiancee.
Does anyone have any statistics on how often these programs really work? The most recent data from 2022 showed there were 115,000 trafficking victims identified around the world, but it didn’t identify how many were identified by flight attendants. It did say that 80% of international trafficking victims traveled by air, but frequently traveled by themselves with mistaken ideas of what was going to happen. A lot of the trafficking is economic, not all are trafficked for sex work.
It’s a big problem, but I’m not sure domestic flights is the biggest target.
@DaveS … +1 .
“False positives will happen. That’s better than false negatives which will lead to a life of unspeakable horror for someone.” But, we observe false positives, but not false negatives. So, we look at false + frequency vis a vis true +. The false + makes these blogs, but I can’t remember the headline of an FA catching a true +. Of course, we want ever possible case of HT stopped, but we can ignore the cost of false +.
This was my local news. They “profiled” him because of his appearance and that they were coming back from Vegas. He was flying with his own child and a friend. Another Southwest failure; I hope his lawsuit bankrupts them.