WATCH YOUR TONGUE….The Washington Post reports that a Muslim family was tossed off a flight to Orlando yesterday. AirTran spokesman Tad Hutcheson explains:
“At the end of the day, people got on and made comments they shouldn’t have made on the airplane, and other people heard them,” Hutcheson said. “Other people heard them, misconstrued them. It just so happened these people were of Muslim faith and appearance. It escalated, it got out of hand and everyone took precautions.”
“It just so happened” indeed. But it gets even worse. Apparently after making these comments that “shouldn’t” be made on an airplane and freaking out some high-strung passengers, the flight was delayed:
As a result of that report, federal officials made the decision to order all 104 passengers from the plane and re-screen them and their luggage before allowing the flight to take off for Orlando — two hours late and without the nine passengers.
So everybody was thoroughly rescreened, luggage was rechecked, and presumably it turned out that the Muslim family didn’t have so much as a nail file on them. But they were kicked off the flight anyway. And TSA’s reaction? Apparently they think the system worked exactly the way it was supposed to.
Welcome to 2009.
