posted on February 8, 2004 03:30:22 PM newAirline Pilot Urged Christians on Flight to Tell Other Passengers About Their Religion
The Associated Press
Published: Feb 8, 2004
NEW YORK (AP) - An American Airlines pilot asked Christians on his flight to identify themselves and suggested the non-Christians discuss the faith with them, the airline said.
The case was handed over to the airline's personnel department for an investigation, spokesman Tim Wagner said Sunday.
"It falls along the lines of a personal level of sharing that may not be appropriate for one of our employees to do while on the job," he said earlier.
American's Flight 34 was headed from Los Angeles to New York's John F. Kennedy Airport on Friday when the pilot asked Christians on board to raise their hands, Wagner said.
The pilot, whose name was not released, told the airline that he then suggested the other passengers use the flight time to talk to the Christians about their faith, Wagner said.
The pilot also told passengers he would be available or discussion at the end of the flight. Wagner said the pilot had just returned to work from a weeklong mission trip to Costa Rica.
Because of privacy issues, there would likely never be any announcement about what kind of punishment or reprimand the pilot may face, Wagner said. The pilot was not scheduled to fly during the weekend, he said.
posted on February 8, 2004 05:54:27 PM new
So they chatted the whole flight and got two converts to the Muslim faith and one Buddist.
I stopped going to a restaurant here because they started displaying religeous literature at the tables. I go there to eat not worship. To be reminded the owner thinks you are a heathen swine doesn't really make you want to stay there.
posted on February 8, 2004 06:22:41 PM new
Maybe American Airlines pilots are suffering from stress across the board...
In an unrelated incident a few days ago, an American Airlines pilot "flipped-off" the officials finger-printing him in Brazil. It cost him over $12,000 to apologize:
posted on February 8, 2004 06:31:42 PM new
And more about the "Christian" flight comes out:
"Passenger Amanda Nelligan told WCBS-TV of New York that the pilot called non-Christians "crazy" and that his comments "felt like a threat." She said she and several others aboard were so worried they tried to call relatives on their cell phones before flight attendants assured them they were safe and that people on the ground had been notified about the pilot's comments."
posted on February 8, 2004 07:08:52 PM new
Pat - I'm curious about where the original article came from that they chose to edit the part about passengers feeling threatened by the actions. That seems like a rather important part for someone to deem not neccessary to print.
~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~
If it's really "common" sense, why do so few people actually have it?
[ edited by Fenix03 on Feb 8, 2004 07:09 PM ]
posted on February 8, 2004 07:15:54 PM new
If the pilot had really been serious about getting converts, he could have just switched the engines off for a few minutes and gone into a nosedive.
I'd convert quick!
-------------------
Replay Media
Games of all kinds!
posted on February 8, 2004 07:26:21 PM new
Fenix, I actually read about this for the first time yesterday at an Associated Press wire-feed site I frequent. I didn't bother to post about it yesterday and when I was hunting around for "fun" stuff to post today, the original AP link had scrolled off, but this latest bit about one passenger's experience was there, so I snagged it. Really, it's just an update of an earlier report in which not many details were available because the story had just "broken".
posted on February 8, 2004 09:12:21 PM newThe Sun, a British tabloid, is reporting that the American Airlines pilot who called the non-Christians aboard his Flight 34 from Los Angeles to New York (it's
a regularly scheduled flight) "crazy" had spent the previous week at a "religious camp" -- the "mission" obliquely referred to in AP reports -- in Puerto Rico.
posted on February 9, 2004 02:16:41 AM new
It really is frightening how much information is out there on the Web. With just one search and one click, I found a news story that included this American Airlines pilot's full name and city/state of residence. Two clicks after that, I had his home address, the name of his wife, their private phone number, and both their email addresses. I also know what this man's hobbies are and the names and email addresses of some of his friends. I know that he was adopted in 1949.
Nope, I'm not going to repeat any details here but y'all should be aware of just how "open" our lives are on the Internet.
Never, never, never publish your full name and city/state online outside of a secure server.
(And for those of you who might attempt to locate "Pat Smith", good luck! My name grants me anonymity amongst millions of others nationwide, and thousands of others in California. )
Really, you guys, it creeped me out that I could find out so much about this pilot -- without any fancy spyware, btw -- so please be careful.
And now, I don't want to talk about this man or what he did on his flight any more.
posted on February 10, 2004 08:26:39 AM new
So, a change of topic.
Ralph Steadman
Dear Mr. Vonnegut
The other day I was asked to do the now common act of taking off my shoes at the airport security screening. As I deposited my shoes in the tray, a sense of utter absurdity washed over me. I have to take my shoes off and have them scanned by an X-ray machine because some guy tried to blow up an airliner with his sneakers. And I thought, I feel like I’m in a world not even Kurt Vonnegut could have imagined. So now that I find I can ask you such questions, tell me, could you have imagined it? (We’re in real trouble if someone figures out how to make explosive pants.)
Patrick Mazza
Seattle
Dear Patrick,
The shoe thing at the airports and Code Orange and so on are world-class practical jokes, all right. But my all-time favorite is one the holy, anti-war clown Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989) pulled off during the Vietnam War. He announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if this was true or not. Or so we hoped.
Kurt
posted on February 10, 2004 09:27:32 AM new
Explosive Pants: Recipe
Take one pair of white cotten painter's pants in heavy canvas. - Place in concentrated lab grade nitric acid that has no heavy amount of dissolved nitrogen oxide gases (red fuming- pentoxide) a slight white fuming is OK ( Nitrous Oxide)
Drip concentrated sulfuric acid slowely into the nitric acid drop by drop to take up the water liberated by the reaction. The vessel should have room for the sulfuric acid to pool in the bottom and it should not filter down through the pants but be feed in to the side or beneath. The volume of sulfuric should not exceed 35% of the nitric before the mix is replaced and drained. An excess of sulfuric will cause the white cotton to become discolored from dehydration of the cotton so the bath should be changed three times. When there is no further warmth produced by the third bath the cotton will have been converted to gun cotton - nitrocellulose. If the pants start to turn amber the reaction is done and time to pull them. They can be flushed with clean water to remove all the acid. Pat and drip dry do not tumble in dryer. Any rivits will have been dissolved and need replaced.
The material will burn with a flash and gasses but to really detonate it requires confining it in a vessel that will allow a substantial pressure build up until it bursts. Perhaps a fake large thermos bottle? It can be cut up with scissors to stuff in the vessel.
Edited to add: There are so many things that can be made explosive and so many ways to shape them into innocent looking objects that there is simply no way to keep them off a plane. Especially if a suicide bomber wants to do it. There are many metallic based explosives that the nitrogen sensing equipment can not sense at all. Some is as common as the compound that is found in your airbags in your car. You could swallow explosive in plastic bags or condoms and enter a plane with enough inside your body to take the plane down. And as a machinist I can assure you there are tens of thousands of people who can machine a gun from plastics and composite materials that have less metal in them than a dime.
The only ones you can stop are the idiots like the shoe bomber who was too cheap to buy a good grade of plastic coated fuse that would burn when wet. Crap you can buy fuse that burns underwater.
posted on February 10, 2004 09:36:41 AM new
You know the reaction to the pilot shows people are smart enough to be afraid of religeous fanaticism no matter what the sect. Even if they are too polite to mention it for the most part when the nuts are labeled Christian in any way. And I agree I would be worried what was going to happen if the fellow was a rambling nut case who could no longer figure out where such babbling was appropriate. He could decide God had ordained him to crash into the UN or some such thing as well as any Muslim zealot. I probably would have turned down any refreshment on that flight too - even if it was not Koolaid.
posted on February 10, 2004 03:29:55 PM newExclusive: Interview with American Airlines pilot who told Christian passengers to raise their hands
Since he's gone ahead and spoken publicly using his name, I'm posting this
"If you have five minutes, I'll tell you why I did it," American Airlines captain Roger Findiesen told Advocate.com as Flight 34 had all but emptied out after its arrival at New York's JFK Airport, on Friday, February 6. "I felt that God was telling me to say something [to the passengers]."
Findiesen is the pilot about whom CNN and other media have been reporting since Saturday; even The New York Times ran a story about how an American Airlines pilot, using the P.A. system before takeoff from Los Angeles International Airport on Friday morning, requested that Christians on his flight identify themselves.
As the plane sat immobile, waiting for its slot to take off, Findiesen asked Christian passengers to raise their hands and said that "everyone else on board" might want to "make good use" of the flight. The implication was that non-Christians should learn about the Christian faith from the passengers who had raised their hands.
Passenger Amanda Nelligan told WCBS-TV of New York that the pilot called non-Christians "crazy" and that his comments "felt like a threat," although other passengers remember the word "crazy" having been playfully applied to the Christians on board. Nelligan said she and several others aboard were so worried they tried to call relatives on their cell phones before flight attendants assured them they were safe and that people on the ground had been notified about the pilot's comments.
Findiesen's identity has been shielded by American Airlines, but the pilot spoke candidly to The Advocate and Advocate.com editor in chief Bruce C. Steele, who identified himself to the captain at the end of the flight. Findiesen then confirmed to Steele his identity, the spelling of his name, and that his home base is Washington, D.C. At no time did Findiesen mention homosexuality or say anything antigay. During the three- to five-minute interview, he was positive and upbeat and interested only in explaining the importance of witnessing about his faith.
What Findiesen said, as best the stunned passengers could recall once they were able to move about the cabin and confer after Flight 34 took off, was this: "I just got back from a mission," Findiesen said after making a routine announcement about the plane being second in line for takeoff. "You know, they say about half of Americans are Christians. I'd just like the Christians on board to raise their hands."
In the suddenly hushed coach section of the airplane, a few nervous passengers raised one hand, most no higher than shoulder level, none above tops of the seats.
"I want everyone else on board to look around at how crazy these people are," the pilot continued, with an intonation suggesting he was using the word "crazy" in a positive, even admiring manner. Evidently addressing the non-Christian passengers, he concluded that they could "make good use of [the flight], or you can read your paper and watch the movie."
The movie on the flight was Under the Tuscan Sun, with Diane Lane and Sandra Oh as Lane's lesbian best friend.
Findiesen did not directly ask Christians to witness, nor did he explicitly ask non-Christians to talk to the people he imagined were raising their hands, but the implication that he hoped such interactions would take place was clear, and he confirmed his desire to foster religious discussion in his interview with Advocate.com.
"I just wanted to give Christians a chance to talk about why they're Christians," he said, standing in the forward galley at the end of the flight as the final passengers departed. "I obviously couldn't go back there and address everyone directly, so I used the P.A.
"I just got back from a mission in Costa Rica," said Findiesen, a tall white man with neatly trimmed thick white hair and a mustache, both lightly peppered with black. "I felt that God was telling me to say something." He went on to explain that he felt God wanted him to witness to the passengers on his first flight upon returning to work for American Airlines after his mission. Despite this feeling, he said, he had decided not to say anything--but then he got another sign from God.
A minor problem with the plane's braking system had developed during final checks before takeoff, he said, a problem that might have grounded the aircraft, on which every seat was taken, in part because another American flight from Los Angeles to New York had been canceled that morning. But after a simple maneuver involving a power source, the braking problem inexplicably "disappeared," Findiesen said, and the plane was cleared for departure, and that's when he knew he had to use the P.A. system to talk about his Christian faith.
Flight attendants were inundated with questions and complaints, and the pilot came back on to the P.A. system a couple of hours into the flight to apologize: Not to the paying passengers, but to the flight attendants. "I'd just like to apologize to the flight attendants" for the remarks he had made before takeoff, he said over the P.A. He said he had heard the crew had "taken a little heat" for his witnessing and that he would be available at the end of the flight to answer any questions or hear any complaints himself.
He then apologized again to the flight attendants and ended his announcement.
Asked by Advocate.com whether he felt he should also have apologized to his passengers, Findiesen paused. "I felt bad for the flight attendants," he said. As for the passengers, he said that he felt making himself available to talk to them as they deplaned was sufficient.
Asked whether it was part of his job as an American Airlines pilot, trusted with the safety of hundreds of passengers, to witness about his faith from the cockpit, he said it was not. But, he asserted, "there's actually no regulation against doing what I did." He also reminded Steele that the plane was not moving at the time of his original announcement.
The case was handed over to the airline's personnel department for an investigation, American Airlines spokesman Tim Wagner said Sunday. "It falls along the lines of a personal level of sharing that may not be appropriate for one of our employees to do while on the job," he said.
Because of privacy issues, there would likely never be any announcement about what kind of punishment or reprimand the pilot may face, Wagner said.
While Findiesen repeated to Steele that he was sorry his fellow crew members had taken heat for his comments, he expressed no regret for having made them and no regret for not having apologized to the American Airlines customers he was serving on the flight. But, he added, "I won't do it again, if you want to make a big deal of it."
posted on February 10, 2004 04:40:54 PM new
Yup - People who see the hand of God in things scare the crap outa me. He sees it in a braking system clearing up (implication it's a miricle).
I'd worry when he will see a warning light another time and dismiss it because the Lord will take care of it.
Had a fellow here in town I had recover my couch. He had a little uphostery business. He walked me out to my car and as I was getting in the clouds cut the sun off to us. He said - "The Lord took the sun away."
At first I thought he was cracking a joke, but he wasn't. To him God sits and guides each cloud to direct sun where he wishes or denies it for some reason. There is no chance or randomness.
If he flips a coin God picks heads or tails. Now maybe that doesn't bother you but it sends a shiver down my spine. To me it is the same as the fatalism the Arabs display saying they can't prevent the trampling deaths at the Hajj because it is Allah's will. Even the Amish do it refusing to put lightning rods on their barns because it would be presumptuous to turn aside the stroke of heaven.
Yup these looney tunes scare the crap out of me.
posted on February 24, 2004 01:41:14 PM new
Thy People's Will Be Done
Flying the fanatical skies with American Airlines
Direct Flight and Lots of Nuts
by Alan Bisbort - February 19, 2004
There are people, millions of them, who don't agree with my political opinions or share a single ideological notion that I've ever expressed. So be it.
Within this multitude, however, there exists a subgroup -- also composed of millions -- who, insisting that God guides their hearts, have branded me, whom they don't know, have never met and never will meet if I have anything to do with it, an evil and depraved sinner. Of course, when I consider the source of such vitriol -- embodied by the likes of Pat Robertson, a broker of both human souls and African diamond mines, or Ann Coulter, who has in the past suggested killing all liberals and forcefully converting all Muslims to Christianity, and of late has been mocking Max Cleland's loss of three limbs in Vietnam -- I feel personally consoled.
But this does not make me feel better about the future of my country. That's because these millions, who have more in common with the Taliban than any enlightened theological or spiritual leader this world has ever known, wield tremendous power. Everywhere you turn in Washington these days, some fundamentalist stands foursquare against reason, civil debate, public well-being and even immutable facts buried in statistics, pie charts and graphs -- the hallmarks of bipartisan public policy.
Despite these handicaps, they have shaped our national policy with very little resistance offered, giving us everything from the "crusade" of our foreign policy to the "have dominion over all ye survey" environmental policy. Indeed, James R. Lyons, the under secretary for natural resources and environment at the Department of Agriculture for eight years, and now a lobbyist for a nonprofit environmental group and Yale professor, has found the experience of dealing with them exhausting and infuriating. He was, in fact, "fired" from his position by Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) when he refused to allow a timber sale that would lose American taxpayers $25 million (but further line the pockets of Republican fundamentalist donors).
For someone like Lyons, who has spent a career working with members of both parties and actually enjoys helping shape bipartisan policy, this is as strong as it gets: "They are doing substantive harm to the environment. If they're allowed four more years, they will do irreparable damage to our waterways, to our biodiversity and to our forests."
Lest any armchair fundamentalists out there get the wrong idea, none of this is stated from a position of areligious "humanism." Each Sunday, in fact, during silent prayer at my church I ask that the anger I feel toward these people be lifted from my heart and that the darkness they have visited upon my land be whisked away in the healing light of truth. And I ask that when George W. Bush and his self-appointed God squad are gone that I never again disturb my gray matter on them. I pray only that they disappear into their inner darkness and leave the rest of us alone.
But, of course, zealots never disappear. Like Dave Koresh, Jim Jones, Osama and Robertson, they're not guided by spiritual generosity but by some deeper pathological condition. There is a sadistic element to their religion, a need to punish and condemn rather than to lift up and inspire.
Lest you think I overstate the case, consider a story, carried in the Guardian , about a recent American Airlines flight from Los Angeles to New York. After taking off and reaching cruising altitude, the pilot introduced himself over the public address system. He then asked all Christian passengers to raise their hands. To those cowed into compliance by this brazen request, he urged a discussion of their faith with "non-believers" aboard.
One passenger later told CNN, "He said if you're Christian, raise your hand. If you're not, you're crazy."
Most passengers did not raise their hands, though presumably most were Christians. Instead, the passengers were rightfully worried that they'd been hijacked by a religious fanatic. For the remainder of the flight across the heartland, the flight crew was tormented by questions from worried passengers.
After the flight landed, the passengers deplaned, got their baggage and went on with their lives. And, had a few not spoken to CNN and their comments not been followed up by a British reporter, that would have, as they say, been that. Instead, an airlines spokesman was made to spin this incident as a "misunderstanding," nothing more than a harmless "sermon" by a zealous pilot.
"... We apologize to anyone who was made to feel uncomfortable," so saith the airline spokesman.
All Americans, including the 275 million not on board, should be made to feel uncomfortable. This was no harmless "sermon." The moment that the pilot demanded people raise their hands, it was a hostage situation. Consider that we live in a climate of international and domestic terrorism, much of it visited upon us by religious fanatics. Passengers had a right to be terrified. This was a terrorist act. Not only should the pilot be fired, he and the airline should face legal action. I am guessing that the only reason this did not happen is that the pilot is a "Christian." Had the pilot been a Muslim, well, don't even go there ... .
