Man’s Vintage Camera Mistaken for Bomb, Causes Emergency Landing
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
I hope this guy gets paid. The moron who flipped out thinking the guy in her aisle was literally looking up bomb making instructions /in flight/ should be civilly liable to the airline and other passengers.
By all means, let’s all disengage critical thinking skills and give equal weight to everyone’s opinion and see where that takes society.
I’ll be fascinated to know just how vintage the camera was and whether it was twin reflex, bellows style, etc.
I read that as "sneakers" and was like "well yeah".
And then I realized it was "speakers" and that it was twenty years ago when the shoe bomber was arrested.
Not even one person considered talking to this man first. If he really had a bomb you’d be dead either way. Why has humanity invented language? Just to not use it? Instead emergency land, evacuate, police until finally someone talks to him?
People are so scared nowadays. In a few years wearing the wrong shoes gets you imprisoned before anyone even talks to you.
Poor guy!
The wrong shoes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Reid%27s_Shoes.jp...
Will this cause anyone to critically examine the actions of the passenger, the flight crew, and JTTF?
Likely not.
Because once person A points a finger in the direction of person B, everyone's incentive is to make sure they are not the one who allowed the "terrorist" to go free.
Easily avoidable false positives like this are security failures. They slowly erode trust instead of allowing a literal big bang demonstration of the failure and therefore they are insidious.
The fact that the crew went with it instead of trying to discreetly observe what the person was fiddling with is annoying as well ... both from the perspective of the person unnecessarily detained and other people whose lives were disrupted.
> Pictured left: The woman and her kids were seated across from her spouse when she noticed another passenger next to her husband watching videos and pictures of vintage cameras
So, this person is sitting next to her husband, fiddling with a bomb, in her imagination, but her husband is completely unaware? Curious. And the flight crew goes along? Weird. Their behinds are covered since they have a "valid" excuse.
Update: Here is similar take[2] published an hour before I was making my comment:
> This incident raises so many questions for me. Firstly why didn’t the woman engage the man in conversation first, he may have been more than happy to show her how old cameras worked. Did the flight attendants even question the man and try to ascertain what the object was? According to Quartz airline personnel are trained to deal with such situations and make reasoned assessments when passengers report suspicious behaviour.
> ...
> Another baffling part of the story is that unless the man was somehow able to secretly hide the cameras inside his body cavities they must have already been thoroughly searched by TSA when he went through security. Any unusual looking device is almost pounced on these days by airport security ...
[1]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10078835/Passenger-...
[2]: https://www.diyphotography.net/vintage-camera-sparks-in-flig...
No, there is very likely something else that she and possibly the flight attendant latched on to and used the camera as an excuse.