58November

I want to address a couple of points

First I am not anti-law enforcement. I give my time, often for free, to go and lecture to law enforcement and FBI groups all over the country. You can see some of my activity on the 58November.com website under Lecture Series. I would not give my time and at times my own money to do that if I were anti-law enforcement.

Second, I do not expect the captain to charge the cockpit. I expect law enforcement to notify the captain of what they are doing, and if the captain sees a threat in those plans, law enforcement to back off and re-evaluate.

Next, in the case of the armed federal agent, who was not a FAM, if the LEO commander had communication with the captain, they would at least have the information before the raid. At that point the LEOs and Captain could at least discuss who to handle it....roll the dice or slip him a note. Either way people would have been better prepared on both sides, which is safer than doing it the way it went down.

Most of the guys flying today don't remember the procedures and regulations that were in place for almost 30 years of a captain being able to refuse armed intervention if the chose. There were signals via flaps to give notice to law enforcement in a non-verbal method, whether the captain needed help or if a "raid" would make things worse. When those policies were adhered to by law enforcement not one innocent life has ever been lost (worldwide) due to a decision a captain had made.

If a captain wants to land, park and say the hell with it, I am headed out the emergency hatch, so be it. All that shows is they were not either willing to participate further or could not. In either case it should be their call.

But that attitude has largely come about because the crews know they are going to be at the mercy of whatever well planned, or half ass planned raid that is coming...and they know they are not going to be listened to in any case.

However, if the crew is still locked up in their bullet proof cocoon law enforcement has lost the best intel source they could ever get.

One of the problems with law enforcement today is they do not view the captain as a trained resource, they view them as just a victim who was made to drive the plane.

At one of my lectures last year a FBI Agent told me "It is ludicrous to think a captain should have any command authority during a crisis."

That statement to me goes right to the issue of why captains are not being fully informed about the status of their craft and threats on board.

It's one thing to say a captain should not be the one to make the decision on how the craft is raided. But many cases have shown that if a captain says stay away and law enforcement does not, people get hurt or killed that did not have to die.

Like the first few comments of people not understanding that someone in a wheel well would be a block of ice after flying from SFO to JFK and would have been dropped like a bomb around the middle marker, there are serious gaps of communication between law enforcement and the crews. When it took so many people to figure that one comment out it shows some communication issues. (and yes I phrased the original comment the way I did to see who would catch on)

In US1267 the type of Airbus that was on that flight had its emergency shoots disabled because the door was opened from the outside. if a "Blue on Blue" firefight had broken out, getting passengers off the plane would not have been possible. So now you have in the cabin children screaming, *****s praying, nuns laying and priests drinking while the rest go crazy trapped inside the plane.

These are the esoteric things that law enforcement are not being trained to understand when dealing with aircraft. They mostly think of it in their preparation as raiding a house or traffic stop. Anyone knows in the business there are many more factors involved.