Arming the friendly skies: Lawsuits to the rescue!

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Written By Deborah Venable

I must digress now to the “good old days” when I first started making use of air travel. The airport in my small Southern town was out past the cotton fields, out of the city limits in the outskirts of the county. It was aptly named, Pryor Field, because that pretty well described it – a field with concrete runways and parking lots with a few hangers thrown about for good measure. My first airplane trip involved taking my hunting rifle on board the two-engine prop passenger plane where it was stored for me in a forward compartment for the puddle jump to Atlanta. From there, I walked through the huge airport, (nobody flew anywhere in the South without passing through Atlanta), and boarded a jet to Philadelphia. Again, the stewardess, (they were stewardesses back then), stored my rifle in the forward compartment where long coats and suits were placed for the passengers’ convenience. Wow! Now there’s a memory for you – passenger convenience used to be a concern of airline companies!

Of course my hunting knife was packed in my suitcase and my pocketknife was in my purse, along with those evil nail clippers. The suitcase was checked through baggage, but the purse stayed with me, unrifled by security guards I might add. In Philadelphia, I was a walking war machine moving through the airport. With my cased rifle slung over my shoulder, my suitcase with the scabbard containing the five-inch blade, and boxes of ammo, and my purse complete with pocketknife, I was terror waiting to happen! Actually I was on my way to the mountains of Pennsylvania to do some deer hunting, so the airlines were just happy I had chosen to fly so they got a piece of the capitalist pie.  

But things were different back then, huh? Well, no – not so far as potential threats were concerned. This was during the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Uprising, slightly after the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of an American president. Granted, the World Trade Towers hadn’t been completed yet, but the Middle East was already on the map and there were wars going on there. Airplanes had already been hijacked, (Cuba was a favorite destination of hijackers you might recall), and nerves were pretty much on edge. Air travel had already caught on though, and customer service was the preferred method of airlines to capture the market. So, I guess things WERE different.

As demands for cheaper air travel persisted in the following decades, the quality of service naturally declined. Customer comfort continued to suffer along with airline safety as the fleet aged and stewardesses became “flight attendants” whose jobs didn’t seem quite as glamorous as they once were.

I had occasions to fly for personal reasons several more times, but mostly became one of the many customers who depended on the airlines to get me where I needed to be for business purposes. After the experience of being a “for business” airline commuter, one picks up valuable information in self-defense. Such as – you really don’t need to pack much, and if you are careful, you can take your small bag with you on the plane. Otherwise, you might end up in a different town from where your bag ends up, and showing up at a business meeting Monday morning with day old blue jeans and no make up is a real possibility. But, how do you possibly defend yourself against the stuff going on now? With privacy invasion, bathroom restrictions, and a general “guilty until proven innocent” credo for air travelers, I just won’t fly any more. Period.

In my America, armed military troops do not stand watch over air travelers. Whether or not there is any ammunition in their assault weapons, they do not belong there. In my America, I can expect to be able to converse in the official language of this country with people in charge of my security, and they’d better damned well be polite! The fact that Americans keep paying for the “privilege” of being treated like criminals is nothing short of unconscionable!  

Airline pilots keep “demanding” that they be allowed to carry defensive arms into their cockpits, and government officials keep refusing to allow it. The pilots keep right on flying those planes, though, don’t they? If the pilots’ unions were “demanding” a significant salary increase, I daresay we would have already seen quite a significant walk out by those same pilots.

Airline passengers keep complaining about being strip searched and otherwise delayed in their attempts to get where they are going, but they keep right on buying those tickets and taking the abuse, don’t they? Personally, I will never fly again until I am allowed to arm myself and know that anyone else on the flight might be similarly armed, and until the unconstitutional searches are ceased. Why that is such a radical idea in today’s America ought to give everyone pause for concern!  

The government and its many entities should stay out of the way of this private industry. Let them determine what they need to charge for tickets to pay for the service they wish to provide. Let them also determine how they will treat their customers. Then I can determine which airlines I will support, NOT with my tax dollars, but with my business.

American Airlines is facing a fifty million dollar lawsuit from a survivor of not one of its passengers on 9/11, but the family of a woman who worked in Tower 1. I will be watching this case for signs that some sanity might begin to return to an arrogant industry that has for too long been controlled by even more arrogant government agencies, and kept afloat by an apathetic public. After all, it wouldn’t be that far fetched to believe that lawsuits might actually accomplish what disingenuous complaining and empty demands have not been able to.

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