A flight attendants union with 2,000 members is upset over what it calls “invasive pat-downs” recently implemented by the TSA.
“We’re getting calls daily about peoples’ experiences, our members are concerned,” said Deborah Volpe, Vice President of the Association of Flight Attendants Local 66.
Volpe confirmed that the union is offering advice to its flight attendants, who mostly work for Tempe-based USAirways, involving the security moves.
According to a union email obtained by ABC15, it tells flight attendants if they opt out of using the body scanner through security and are required to undergo a pat-down to ask the pat-down be conducted in a private area with a witness.
“We don’t want them in uniform going through this enhanced screening where their private areas are being touched in public,” said Volpe.
Some passengers have told ABC15 they’ve already encountered flight delays due to crew members having problems with TSA employees.
“It (delay) was over three hours when they finally found a crew member to take her place,” said Les Johnson who says his Charlotte bound flight was delayed. “She (flight attendant) felt that she was groped and supposedly filed a claim.”
According to Volpe, complaints from flight attendants are expected to continue to increase and said some flight attendants are planning to file lawsuits.
“They’ve already contacted the ACLU,” said Volpe when referring to some members of the union.
Volpe made it clear the union is not against security.
“Security is the most important aspect, our offices were used as murder weapons,” said Volpe. “Keep in mind we undergo extensive background checks and we fly quite often.”
Volpe said she has been a flight attendant for nearly 25 years and she and other union leaders are pushing for a “crew pass” system that would allow flight attendants and pilots to essentially by-pass security.
“We don’t want to delay anyone, we just feel this pat-down is a little much.”
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(Source: ABC 15)
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11 Responses
When you live in a country that, increasingly, looks like Sodom, this is what you get!
to bad , let them suffer like us plain people
yosse, if the U.S. government would be willing to profile, then they wouldn’t need to do this.
According to a recent article on The Atlantic the pat downs have purposefully been made more embarrassing to encourage people to go through the body scanner, which makes accurate pictures of what their body looks like under their clothes and even though the TSA/governement have claimed the contrary stores the pictures (though they may have taken care of that ‘glitch’).
As #3 says security in American airports would be improved a lot more by better training of the security staff and profiling/screening (though that may be harder to do at the scales of major airports).
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/10/for-the-first-time-the-tsa-meets-resistance/65390/
The TSA and the other bureaucracies refuse to learn from Israeli methods because they don’t want to admit the Jews do something better.
Profiling is a basic step, plus face-to-face interviewing by literate, professionally-trained RESPONSIBLE people. But in the USA today, such people are hard to find.
If they weren’t so obsessed with people’s bodies, they would follow my idea and have computers scanning the person without even creating an image. The technology for that is simpler than face recognition that all modern cameras are equipped with.
yosse, that’s a very big “they”. The TSA is one group and flight attendants are another. Flight attendants are usually friendly, and I wouldn’t wish this on them.
Also, every one of them must go through this, not us.
I’,m with #1 on this if you learn all the midrashim on how sedom looked before it got destroyed i hate to say it, it looked much like the u.s looks now i should say the u.s gov. and court system, there really is so difference so destruction of the u.s seems imminent
eric, While you can point to corruption as a similarity, that’s not the whole thing. Actually, as long as the government is left leaning, it is the opposite of Sedom.
Hey! The picture on this article violates the law of not saving the images.
It is not much better in other parts of the world…