the terrorists have won...

...simple as that. The latest installment of "Ask the Pilot" on Salon.com (day pass required, but worth it) details a number of incidents that have cost airlines hundreds of thousands of dollars since Lieberman lost to Lamont in CT the British arrests resulting in our escalation from Big Bird to Ernie. Here's my favorite:

On Aug. 19, a Delta Air Lines jet made an emergency landing in San Antonio, Texas, because -- brace yourselves -- a passenger spent an unusual amount of time in the lavatory. According to flight attendants, the bathroom's ceiling panels had been moved and the smoke detector tampered with. The man, a resident of San Antonio, was detained and questioned -- including a physical search of his home -- before the FBI pronounced him "not suspicious at all." (The decrepit state of lavatories on most U.S. aircraft makes the crew's reaction even more overblown, but that's a topic for another time.)

the last sentence in parentheses is so true, particularly on Delta. Then there's this one:

In 2004, a United 747 bound for Los Angeles jettisoned thousands of gallons of fuel into the Pacific and returned to Australia because a discarded airsickness bag was discovered with the letters "BOB" scrawled across it. At its most nefarious, BOB is crew member jargon for "babe on board," but for reasons that defy explanation, the crew mistook the acronym for bomb on board, and went all the way back to Sydney.

I'm all for flight crews being pro-active when it comes to anticipating a shift in the paradigm from "set piece" plays like 9/11 to single-plane attacks, but the incidents outlined in the Salon article are just goofy. Read them, you'll find it interesting and humorous in a very sad way.

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