THE AVIATION ARENA IS SIZZLING!

I can recall very few weeks that were so full of major aviation news such as this last week of September 2007. And those are the main headlines:

THE PRESIDENT TO THE RESCUE. For the first time in recent memory, the president of the United states has addressed the issue of commercial aviation, or to put it more accurately, the problems of commercial aviation. After months in which there eas a negative news story about the industry every other day, things have gotten so bad that no other than Mr. Bush himself felt compelled to summon the Secretary of Transportation and tell the media in the oval office that situations where passengers are being stuck on the tarmac for hours are unacceptable.

MORE U.S. ROUTES TO CHINA. The Department of Transportation granted U.S Airways the right to operate a new route between Philadelphia and Beijing, and also granted Delta Airlines the right to operate a new route between Atlanta and Shanghai. This comes as a result of a new aviation agreement signed earlier this year between the two countries. U.S. Airways and Delta were so far the last two airlines, among the six major U.S. airlines, that did not operate any flight to east Asia. The new flights are scheduled to begin in 2008, while in 2009 another four new China routes are planned to take place.

BRITISH #1. British Airways has announced its new long haul airliners purchase deal: a combination of A380s and B787s. The news made a serious buzz even in the media outside the industry (like CNN), but it was quite predictable. In actual life, the 380 carries only a few dozens passengers more than the old 744, so operating it is not such a big risk, and in any way, when we’re talking about BA there are no real risks.

BRITISH #2. A few days before its A380 deal announcement, BA said that it is going to start flying from continental Europe to New York. This is the first step being taken by a European airline in the lines of the new U.S. - E.U. aviation agreement, which says that all European and U.S. airlines will be able to fly from any city in Europe to any city in America and vice versa. As I have been doing for the last couple of months, I will keep on watching this very interesting story.

SCANTILY CLAD PASSENGERS RIGHTS

For the last few weeks, the American media have pumped up a juicy story: a young woman came to NBC’s Today show with her mother and her lawyer, and told the viewers of an incident that took place onboard a Southwest airliner. The woman, Kyla Ebbert, boarded the plane in San Diego, heading to Tucson. Right after taking her place, a flight attendant called her to the front of the plane and told her that she will have to get off the plane because of her skimpy outfit. Ebbert was wearing a mini skirt. You can watch the rest of the incident here.

About a week later, another similar story has emerged on television, this time involving too much cleavage. The airline, though, was still Southwest.

From the media point of view, the reason for dedicating so much air time and bytes room to these stories is obvious: in the center of each one of them stood a young attractive woman – not to say “hot” – and as if that’s not enough, the essential topic here was them being scantily clad and happy to show it on national television. Indeed, the wet dream of a T.V. producer. It’s no secret that as years go by, the so called “mainstream media” is flirting more and more with pornographic materials, and the examples mentioned above is far from the worst in that respect.

But I would like to approach the “outfit” incidents from a different point of view. Those incidents join other ones which are growing in number. Most of them do not find their way to the media – probably because they don’t always involve young attractive women. One incident that did emerge on the web is about an American young man from an Iraqi origin that was forced to change his shirt in order to board a BlueJet plane in JFK. His original shirt carried a slogan in Arabic, saying something like “we will prevail”.

Every few months we get to learn about an incident where some passengers become panicked when they see that a group of Muslim men board their plane. Only after the men are ordered out of the plane it appears that they did not plan to bomb it.

There is no need to mention that when ever commercial aviation is involved there should be no waive in security or safety. But the fact of the matter is that none of the incidents mentioned above or most of the others not mentioned had anything to do with security or safety. The airlines must be reminded that when the passengers get to board the plane, it is after they go through security checks. If any passenger is being suspected of posing a threat to the flight, it is the duty of the security officials to follow him (or her) through any possible check, including, if necessary, strip search him in a closed room. But once the passenger was cleared, the airline shouldn’t have the power to kick him off the flight just because he is whispering in a foreign language or he wears something strange, or, like in the case of those two girls, the passenger wears an outfit that can make some of the other passengers drool.

The power of the airlines to hustle passengers in the holy name of security or safety must come to an end. There should be a clear separation between security checking procedures and the freedom to be who we are even on a plane: men, women, fat, attractive, Americans, Muslims, Jews, Black, White, happy, sad or even depressed. As radical as it may seem, all of us have place on an airliner, provided that we paid for the ticket.