Flight return to STL due to screening issue
 

ST. LOUIS – A company official says a United Airlines Express flight headed to Chicago had to return to St. Louis because of computer trouble in screening passengers.

Spokesman Fred Oxley said GoJet Airlines, the regional carrier operating the flight, had a problem with its computers Friday morning, and manually checked in passengers.

Oxley is a spokesman for Trans State Holdings, which owns GoJet. He says the computers started working after the flight took off from Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. That's when the carrier learned the name of one of the passengers matched one on the Transportation Security Administration's restricted passenger list.

Oxley says the flight returned around 8 a.m. and GoJet determined the passenger was not the same person on the list. The plane took off again around 9:30 a.m. and landed in Chicago.

Pretty sad how things like this can just happen. its up to an airline employee making near min. wage to 'catch' when someone is on a list. How hard do you think it would be to bribe them? the agents pencil whip the pax count at my airline all the time, mostly because the agents just don't care about things like security. you get what you pay for.

LOL yea they catch it when the person is already gone and in the air, and THEN order the plane back when for the time required to get back could have already gone to ORD. All to make sure Mohamed was not on. What joke of a bureaucracy, it's a byproduct of when people stop caring about their job.

With Gojets, it was probably one of the pilots...

lmfao. :p:D:p

Bashing GoJet pilots.. Did you know most of the pilots there are now furloguhed TWA,UNITED,ATA,MEDX it is not the same pilot groupe that started it. And let me tell you this we all want to leave but with this economy we are screwed...

Who Then Please, using your same rationale, would be in the left seat ?

are you guys missing this...they said it was a computer problem that was the cause of this..not people not caring or whatever you wanted to blame it on

nope but perhaps you are. How does it make any sense that intelligence lists fall to AIRLINE employees when we pay TSA to simply check that your I.D. matches your boarding pass? shouldn't it be the other way around?? This computer glitch simply highlights that an airline employee is only interested in moving the plane, when things go wrong they tend to bypass the little things like pax counts and watchlists to just 'put em on and push em out'.

its not the agents fault that they are trusted with this task and weren't at the time given the tools to do their job. how can you blame them?

Even if that were true, it still wouldn't make it ok.

Sorry to burst your bubble darling,

But the "easily bribed" ground crew probably make...um, scratch that- DO make more than the junior FO and FA"s so... goes to say the airlines are getting what they pay for In flight and on the ground...Imho... This security breach bs has nothing to do with pay...Honestly what meaningful anti-terrorist tools are available on the front line??? So frustrating nonetheless!!! :mad:

is it the responsibility of the code share airlines (gojet in this case) to police the passengers on its flights even though they didnt sell the ticket? I kinda assumed it was the mainline carrier's problem to make sure that people who arent supposed to be on the airplanes are not on board.

Thinking...

The only people who really look at the pax's itineraries are the ticketing agent... and if the use the kiosk then how are they screened?? And ticketing is done "usually" by mainline. where is this "screening" coming into play???...I'm a bit dense here:p

the failure would be pretty large from what i can see. I'd have expected this to be caught when the individual initially decided to purchase the ticket, that ticket should have been printed with extra security screening written in bold face lettering, only to allow the person to have the ID crosschecked at security to see if the individual was who they say they are. Getting on the plane is about the LAST line of defense. We can say the "crew" is the last line of defense with FFDO, but that only works in a specific scenario. It will prevent another 9/11, but expecting a pilot to be john wayne and go back into the cabin to inspect the situation, inflight, or defuse the situation in the case of the african bomber, is dreamy at best.

It makes me wonder what entity is the first line of defense. Does the Department of Homeland Security compare the name of a person that meets certain criteria to an array of government databases? Or at least supposed to. It seems like an almost impossible task.

EVEN WORSE! That's when you as an employee in charge of pax boarding should start caring, when computers break not when they work. But my point is that they should have used discretion AFTER they found out that the guy was already up in the air and not turn the airplane around. That accomplished nothing when the flight takes as much time to get to the destination as it does to come back. Wait Mohamed, even though we missed you on the ground can you hold off on the bomb just for a second until you come back to STL so that we can double check you???

Ok, Einstein, unless you have super-secret inside GoJet info that the guys name was indeed Mohamed, then that's a pretty arrogant statement...both of them. Especially on a public forum. But, I'd expect nothing less. Carry on.

Dang!! Positive-now I'm going to defend AirWillie!! Mohammed Atta, and at least 2 other 9/11 hijackers had mohammed in their names. To be fair, Willie would have been more correct to use Abdul instead, since most bad guys prefer this moniker -Richard Reid (real name Abdul Rahim), Blind Sheik (Omar Abdul Raman), Umar Faruk Abdulmutallab (Northwest bomber), etc.

So what exactly makes AirWillie's statement arrogant? Our political correctness has TSA shaking-down Granny Johnson and Bubba Smith at security checkpoints, while idiots like Napolitano and Gorelick direct them to not offend all the Mohammeds and Abduls out there...until we smell cordite wafting into the cockpit, and then our dim-wits in government will investigate how it could happen! Madness!!

Oh yeah! Has GoJet hired at least 126 furloughed pilots recently from United, ATA, etc.? Another poster stated that the "majority" of GoJetters are from there...must have missed that hiring boom!

Yes. I know that the hijackers were named Mohamed. And I hope they're burning in the pits of hell, but to associate all people named Mohamed with being a terrorist is stupid and uninformed. And not all people named Mohamed are of Arab decent...for instance, there was (what appeared to be) a caucasian guy on CNN over X-mas named Mohamed talking about something.

Kareme Abdul Jabbar....

You must be confused, Jimmy...my name is Roger Murdock...I'm the co-pilot!:p

"My dad says that you don't work hare enough on defense."

I've heard that crap since UCLA...

:)

He couldn't help himself. Any post from airwillie and positive rate seems to try and find any angle possible to make himself feel superior (even if the subject is political correctness in a forum that's anything but).

Grow up pal.