Comments on: Flight School Fiasco: No Lessons Learned After 9/11

By: William Shanley

William Shanley — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 03:23:35 +0000

I want to apologize to everyone for passing along the data that 60 million Americans were living on less than $7 per day published by the New York Times, Financial Times of London and the World Socialist Web Site without doing an independent verification. I’m so sorry, and am working to correct the mess. However, Annie Jacobsen, the rude and nasty, shrill paranoid woman who harassed me and then refused to copy me her on her piece is hardly doing your readers justice with her way of being or tactics. Moreover, she excerpted and took out of context some rather playful biographical comments and used them to ridicule , not inform. Hardly the stuff of good neighbors. Isn’t this the woman who was so paranoid about Muslim clerics on a plane that she had it grounded because of her paranoia of terrorists? I suggest that if she wants to see a real terrorist, that she book a flight to to Iraq, where several well respected studies now report that between 600,000 and 1.2 million Iraqis have died since we invaded. Or, go to the concentration camp Israel has made the Gaza, break bread with the little people while US supplied helicopter gunships terrorize you to death. Many blessings to all.

By: Steve in Ohio

Steve in Ohio — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:51:50 +0000

Tim, I beg to differ. Let’s return to that morning of Septmeber 11th: Hijackers trained as pilots suddenly attack other passengers and Stewardesses, then rush up to the cockpit door and… find it locked and bolted. Clawing desparately at the door, they finally… return to their seats and wait to be arrested, their pilot training not having provided them the power to break through locked, secured doors after all.

By: michael clarke

michael clarke — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:22:30 +0000

But what about the plot? I mean, Looose Change and Michael Mooore showed how Bush was behind everything, and wernt those Navy planes? You mean that 19 foreign terrorists actually did that? Lighten up, Dude….

By: blabbinit

blabbinit — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 04:34:38 +0000

Wow, this is scary. You would think that there would be a safer guard against this stuff from happening. I wouldn’t fault the flight schools, but it is the government’s responsibility to have some kind of law in place to manage and verify the people who are taking the classes. We can’t let terrorists train themselves on our homeland.

By: Tim Sumner

Tim Sumner — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 03:37:57 +0000

Gustave –
Perhaps you are right, maybe you can learn the controls, sequences, and steps you need to fly at you PC’s keyboard. I’m skeptical though for it is a lot to mentally translate from that keyboard to the actual controls. Yet the TSA’s biggest failing is one of trust, the promise it was tasked to keep to the crews and passengers. Our country was successfully attacked and my family buried what was left of one the last time; that was one attack too many and one funeral far too soon.

Steve –
That training contributed just as much as the things you sited.

By: Steve in Ohio

Steve in Ohio — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:56:10 +0000

3,000 people weren’t murdered because hijackers took flight training in U.S. Flight Schools; 3,000 people were murdered because hijackers had easy access to airplane cockpits and passengers in hijacked airplanes were highly trained to sit still and wait for the authorities to rescue them.

God bless all the victims of that day, and God especially bless the heroes on Flight 93 who saved hundreds of more lives.

By: Gustave

Gustave — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:52:59 +0000

Steve in Ohio:-

I know what you mean. Like you, I doubt that the TSA, or Homeland Security, are doing very much better in the areas that are genuinely safety-critical. But if they were to say, “Frankly, we have to prioritize, and we’ve been putting our marbles into areas in which we think there’s more of a risk than flight schools,” I for one wouldn’t beat them up for it.

Tim Sumner:-

The truth is that one could probably train a reasonably intelligent and co-ordinated individual to keep, say, a B767 right-side-up and fly it from A to B (assuming, of course, that it is already in flight) without that person ever getting any hands-on cockpit training at all, relying exclusively on computer-based instruction with software available on the open market. Microsoft Flight Simulator wouldn’t do it, but some of the more sophisticated IFR packages for professional pilots like Elite Jet 8.1 very well might.

By: Tim Sumner

Tim Sumner — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:21:45 +0000

Sorry. Make that greenbaypressgazette.com

By: Tim Sumner

Tim Sumner — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:06:51 +0000

BTW (#2), the TSA has an even bigger cash cow it just rolled out. See greenbaygazette.com, the March 1, 2008, edition, for this article: ID cards designed to protect nation’s ports. One million workers at $132.50 per ID card.

By: Tim Sumner

Tim Sumner — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:43:43 +0000

Consider this.

The Transportation Security Administration first denied it let thousands of aliens attend flight schools without a security check before admitting, during 2005 alone, that only “836 aliens” attended without first being checked. The TSA now says that after their training, it determined that none of them was a threat. The TSA also has said that “60 to 70 percent” of all flight school attendees never complete the training yet the TSA allows them to start training 30 days after applicants send in their fingerprints and their $130 application fee.

The “business” and “tourist” 9/11 hijacker pilots never fully completed their training, yet learned enough to murder 3,000 people.

BTW, the law’s intent was (as Congress stated) that the checks be completed prior to an alien attending, and then only for those with a student visa. Yet the language of the bill left wiggle room for the exceptions, for aliens to attend if 30 days elapsed after they paid their fee and submitted their fingerprints. The exceptions have turned into the norm, the TSA is deliberately ignoring the student visa requirement, and this is a cash cow for both the TSA (the $130 fee) and the flights schools ($10 million plus per year in extra revenue).