'Keep an eye out' is best message for air travelers

St Paul Pioneer Press ^ | 10/22/03 | JOE SOUCHERAY

[Valin]

It would not have occurred to me, as it did to young Nat Heatwole, to bring box cutters onto an airplane just to see if I could get away with it. Even if I wanted to be useful, as Heatwole is claiming, I have the problem of sounding the alarms every time I've gone to the airport in the past two years. The metal eyelets on my shoes have sounded the beepers.

Heatwole, a junior at Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C., said he went through normal security checks at Baltimore-Washington International Airport on Sept. 14 and at Raleigh-Durham on Sept 12. On each occasion, he carried box cutters, modeling clay that was supposed to resemble plastic explosives, bleach and matches. He said he put the bleach in sunscreen bottles. He also said he e-mailed federal authorities and told them what he had done and also left his name and phone number.

I guess, after about five weeks, the authorities actually checked and decided to call the guy.

Now, I suppose you've got a divided following for this character. To some, he is a hero who has demonstrated a courageous act of civil disobedience to better his fellow man. To others, he is a smart-aleck college punk who bet he could get away with such lawlessness and did so at great risk. If he had been caught by security, he would be going to jail for a long time.

I fall into the second camp. This creep didn't do me any favors. In the first place, he broke the law. For all we know, his bringing a box cutter onto an airplane was the first time anybody had done such a thing since Sept. 11, 2001. Besides, if I have been following my homeland security news carefully, we are way beyond box cutters if we want something to worry about. The cave dwellers got away with that once. They aren't going to get away with it again.

Based on the 10 or so flights I have been on since Sept. 11, 2001, the passengers have been ready to pounce on anybody who even gets up and stretches. And we have all read of the passengers who have euphemistically subdued unruly fellow travelers, meaning they beat the crap out of them.

The one important message we learned two years ago was that we absolutely cannot and should not expect the government to make flying foolproof. We shouldn't expect the government to make anything foolproof. That's what got us into trouble in the first place: planeloads of passengers who had been instructed for at least a generation to remain seated like sheep in their seats and trust that federal rules and regulations would keep them from harm.

Heatwole didn't accomplish anything we didn't already know. I have a friend who is a Transportation Security Administration agent. In fact, now that I think about it, I know a couple of those guys. Their best admonition remains, "Keep an eye out.''

It's not that they are intentionally lax or are trying to keep an ear on the ballgame score. It's more to the point that bad people are going to do what they are going to do and government rules have never stopped them.

So what did Heatwole prove? Well, he proved that any smart guy who wanted to take a big gamble could bring a knife on an airplane. I'm betting that if Heatwole had actually brandished one of the things, he would have been beaten to a pulp by passengers who no longer are going to sit there and hope for the best.

And that government you might still want to trust, the same government that Heatwole claims he is only trying to help? You go ahead. That's the same government that apparently took five weeks to get around to checking Heatwole's e-mail; the knives were on the planes all that time.

[lilylangtree]

This student isn't a hero but I'm not surprised by what he did. Actually, I view his actions as a typical young adult that still thinks at the early teen level. (I raised one so I have some experience.) He did the govt and the public a necessary evil "good" by poking holes into the security blanket that the govt lays over the people. Equating that to like the poking a hole in the "backdoor" of software, once the authorities become aware of the problem the weak link is closed. Besides, he notified the authorities on what he did to prove a point. It was up to the authorities to act or not act. Sounds to me like the people in charge should get a reprimand on not acting quick enough--5 weeks. If this kid had been a real terrorist, how many people would have died in those 5 weeks?

[The Great RJ]

It is no surprise that this college student succeeded-- federal airline security is run with the efficiency of the US Postal Service and for the same reasons