A Blue Eyed Buddhist

Luis asked in a comment the other day what I thought about the whole Air Tran incident. To be honest, I hadn’t heard of it, so I did a little research.

Here’s the basic story. A guy named Tedd Petruna sent a friend or friends an email that had some pretty big claims in it. You can read the whole text of it on this page (be warned, it’s a right wingnut’s web site).

Here’s some quotes from his email:

On Tuesday, November the 17th, I returned home. If you read the papers the 18th you may have seen a blurb where a AirTran flight was cancelled from Atlanta to Houston due to a man who refused to get off of his cell phone before takeoff.

…

I was in 1st class coming home. 11 Muslim men got on the plane in full attire. 2 sat in 1st class and the rest peppered themselves throughout the plane all the way to the back.

As the plane taxied to the runway the stewardesses gave the safety spiel we are all so familiar with. At that time, one of the men got on his cell and called one of his companions in the back and proceeded to talk on the phone in Arabic very loudly and very aggressively. This took the 1st stewardess out of the picture for she repeatedly told the man that cell phones were not permitted at the time. He ignored her as if she was not there.

he 2nd man who answered the phone did the same and this took out the 2nd stewardess. In the back of the plane at this time, 2 younger Muslims, one in the back, isle, and one in front of him, window, began to show footage of a porno they had taped the night before, and were very loud about it. Now….they are only permitted to do this prior to Jihad. If a Muslim man goes into a strip club, he has to view the woman via mirror with his back to her. (don’t ask me….I don’t make the rules, but I’ve studied) The 3rd stewardess informed them that they were not to have electronic devices on at this time. To which one of the men said “shut up infidel dog!” She went to take the camcorder and he began to scream in her face in Arabic. At that exact moment, all 11 of them got up and started to walk the cabin. This is where I had had enough! I got up and started to the back where I heard a voice behind me from another Texan twice my size say “I got your back.” I grabbed the man who had been on the phone by the arm and said “you WILL go sit down or you Will be thrown from this plane!”

…

Look up the date. Flight 297 Atlanta to Houston .

If this wasn’t a dry run, I don’t know what one is. The terrorists wanted to see how TSA would handle it, how the crew would handle it, and how the passengers would handle it.

I’m telling this to you because I want you to know….

The threat is real. I saw it with my own eyes….

So this email- recounting a “dry run” by some Arab Muslim terrorists, trying to see what would happen, was thwarted by this brave, brave dude. Of course, this set off quite a shitstorm amongst the right wingnut types.

The email goes on to say that the TSA allowed these 11 terrorists to come back onto the airplane and that the flight crew, who bravely put their foot down and refused to fly, were replaced with another crew.

When the media started to follow up on the story, though, it started getting some pretty big holes in it. I could not find a single other person that was quoted about this story that backs up Petruna’s account who was actually on the aircraft when the incident happened. There is one guy, a Chaplain Dr Keith Robinson, who basically backs up the story- but his account isn’t first-hand, it’s all hearsay because he wasn’t on the aircraft when this stuff went down.

And, as it turns out… neither was Tedd Petruna!

That’s right- the guy who told this big huge story about these supposed terorrists wasn’t there. He missed his original flight from Ohio to Houston, so he took a later flight- and that later flight arrived after all this stuff supposedly happened in Atlanta.

From AirTran’s web page concerning the incident:

After conducting additional research into this situation, we have verified, according to flight manifests (legally binding documents) that the individual that allegedly created a first-hand account of events on-board AirTran Airways flight 297, a Theodore Petruna, was never actually on-board the flight.

According to all available records, Mr. Petruna’s trip originated from Akron-Canton, Ohio (CAK) on AirTran flight 205. This flight arrived at the gate in Atlanta at 5:06 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Flight 297, the flight which Mr. Petruna allegedly wrote a first-hand account of, originally pushed back from its gate in Atlanta at 4:40 p.m. EST, a full 26 minutes before flight 205 arrived at the gate in Atlanta making this flight connection impossible.

So either AirTran is willing to fake their flight manifests, or Tedd Petruna is a big fat liar.

I’m voting for the second one.

For one thing, a guy who does say he was on the aircraft said that Petruna was a liar:

Brown told WSBTV that Tedd Petruna, who says a group of Muslim terrorists were casing the plane, is “living in a fantasy world.”

A woman who was seated near the original problem-causer with the cell phone (or camera, according to her account) also debunked Petruna’s story. Nancy Develkis said, in part…

…But the woman sitting behind the man said it wasn’t a phone at all, and feels the entire incident was the result of poor communication.

“He was not talking on a cell phone, it was a camera,” said Nancy Deveikis of Marietta. “He was looking at pictures.”

A flight attendant asked the man twice to turn off the device, Deveikis said. But it was clear the man did not speak English, she said. Although the man was traveling with others, the rest of the group was seated throughout the plane.

When the man did not respond to the flight attendant, she took the camera from him, Deveikis said. Deveikis, who presented ajc.com with her boarding pass for the flight, said she watched the exchange from directly behind the man in seat 28A and the female flight attendant.

Ms Develkis puts most of the blame in this whole mess on inability to communicate.

Petruna contined to claim that he was indeed on the aircraft, saying that he has his boarding pass.

So my friend Luis, knowing that I’m in the aviation business and that my wife is a flight attendant and that we do a LOT of traveling, was curious what I thought.

I think Petruna is full of crap.

I think this for a number of reasons. First, it doesn’t matter that Petruna has a boarding pass for the flight in question. When a passenger doing a two-leg flight with a connection checks in at his/her first airport, they’re frequently issued a boarding pass for the second flight- whether or not their first leg’s flight gets into the airport on time to actually CATCH that second flight doesn’t matter.

I poked around the net and found that independent records on FlightStats.com back up AirTran’s version of the story. The flight, 205, from CAK (Akron-Canton) to Atlanta arrived in ATL with a wheels-down time at 17:06 local time. See for yourself. (You might need to create a FlightStats account, but it’s quick and easy.)

More importantly, it arrived at the gate at 17:14 local. Add to that at least a couple of minutes to get the door opened and get people off the plane, and it seems to me that the very earliest that Petruna could have possibly been even off the CAK-ATL flight was 17:20.

The flight in question, 297, is a bit harder to make out because the actual time it first pulled away from the gate isn’t easy to determine from the records… but with a bit of work you can see it. On this page are those records.

Basically, the flight appears (to me) to have originally left the gate at about the time that AirTran claims. They said it originally left the gate at 16:40 local, which is a full 16 minutes BEFORE Petruna’s flight touched down from CAK (and given that the actual time Petruna’s first flight arrived at the gate was 17:14, the timing issues get even worse for Petruna’s story.

When you look at 297’s records, the first change to the overall time of the flight is at 10:03pm, but that’s Zulu time; in ATL the time was 17:03. From that point on, there’s a bunch of changes to the estimated arrival time. I think that’s when the flight turned around and went back to the gate to sort out the problem with the passenger who was not complying with the crew’s instructions- meaning it appears to me that indeed the plane WAS away from the gate at that point.

And that means that Petruna couldn’t have been on the plane, because his plane from CAK hadn’t arrived yet.

So given that Petruna is a big fat liar, what really happened there?

I think that there was a bunch of guys traveling together. They were probably Muslim, Arabic, or both. (One does not equal the other, you know- there’s more non-Arab Muslims in the world that there are Arab Muslims, and there’s plenty of Arabs who are NOT Muslims, too.)

I think that one of the guys was messing around with some kind of a device. Whether it was a phone or a camera, I don’t know, but considering that the only person who’s on the record and claiming to have directly witnessed it (and who’s credible) said it was a camera, I’m leaning that direction.

I think that the flight attendant told the guy to shut it off and that he didn’t understand. I think that at some point the flight attendant told the flight deck about it and the captain turned the plane around and went back to the gate (actually, to a changed gate- it’s in the records.)

I think that they then escorted the guy off, and his buddies either went willingly or not, but got off the plane. I think they managed to sort the situation out, that someone probably looked through their stuff, and that everyone realized what had happened.

Most of the details in Petruna’s account and that of Robinson’s sound like fantasy. They sound made-up. He talked all tough but when you read his account with an objective eye, it’s obvious that he assigned motives to these guys that were totally NOT proven by any facts. Notice how the first thing he says about the supposed terrorists is that they talked “loudly and aggressively”. The so-called bad guys used third-rate movie dialog like “shut up infidel dog!”. When they were supposedly talking on the phone it “took the flight attendant out of the picture”.

You get the drift. Everything that the supposed bad guys did was part of a big plot- but how could he know that from what happened even if he HAD been on the aircraft, which he wasn’t? AirTran points this out; Petruna claimed to have been in Business/First Class, but he supposedly knew what the guys in the back were watching (porn)?

The flight crew might well have been replaced. That’s nothing weird; due to rules about duty hours, both pilots and flight attendants cannot start a new flight a certain number of hours after their first flight of the day. Likewise, it’s not weird for the airline to have allowed some people to get off the flight once the plane went back to the gate. Petruna claims that he had to demand his way off the plane, but the airline willingly let 12 people off.

I do think that the airline likely played down the ethnicity or possible religion of the passenger that caused the original problem. They don’t want to get sued as possibly being anti-anything.

But all in all, I think this was a load of garbage. I think this guy came running up to the gate too late to catch the flight, but then heard what had happened, saw the guys coming off the plane, and made up a big story about himself being a hero. He wound up catching the later flight home.

What it amounts to is this: Nobody backs up his story. Nobody says “yeah, I saw these brave men forcing these guys to sit down.” Nobody says they heard anyone watching porn. Nobody says that they witnessed any of this except for Petruna, and he’s plainly a right wing paranoid and it really appears that he wasn’t on the flight in the first place.

The details that are out there are very consistent with things that happen in the airline world. Passengers do refuse to turn off their electronic devices; there are breakdowns in communication. The records that are online from independent sources back up the airline’s explanation.

Nothing, in other words, backs up this guy’s story other than one guy who arrived late and got the story from other people (who may or may not have actually seen it), but everything that the airline says to counter his story is backed up by actual evidence.

And here’s the biggest reason to think that this wasn’t some kind of “dry run”… do you honestly think that someone who’s practicing a hijack would in ANY way do something like this to draw attention to themselves? That’s the stupidest theory I’ve ever heard.

If terrorists are making “dry runs” for hijacking, they’re almost certainly doing so as stealthily and carefully as possible. They don’t want to draw attention to themselves; they want everyone to think they’re just another dude on a plane.