Aviation Security Posts

My memory of September 11, 2001, is, at best, a blur except for the images. The scenes, however, are indelibly etched in my mind. It was a sunny morning with temperatures in the low 70s and not a cloud in the sky. A perfect day, I thought. I’d just …

The recent political and military focus on aerostats—balloons—and the resulting cyclone of incomplete communication of verifiable concrete details, the confusion resulting from people demonstrating that they possess no knowledge or understanding of …

SM Spangler It is a statistical reality that regardless of the methods of dissemination, roughly 10 percent of the population will not get the word. Or they will forget they got the word and reflexively follow their atavistic inclinations. Some crea…

Concentrating on a short-term goal is natural when facing unpleasant restrictions, but these inconveniences pale in comparison to the long-term consequences. What unites both timeframes is the inescapable reality that as individuals, societies, and …

Many owners like to personalize their prized aircraft with an N-number that represents them, often with their initials. Before the advent of NextGen, painting the new number on the airplane, and professing it to ATC, covered the customization. Now, …

Almost everywhere you turn among the hundreds of acres of airplanes and lovers of aviation are subtle (and no so subtle) signs that make it clear that the best way to improve the US Air Traffic Control (ATC) system is to “Modernize, Not Privatize.” …

Can Airports Help Revive the Aviation Industry? Dear Reader / Listeners — You now have the option to listen to The Aviation Minute podcast or just read the script of the show below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen a…

Dear Reader / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to The Aviation Minute podcast or read the text below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well. At the risk of droning on about a topic my pals David and M…

AP photo of the MH17 site in eastern Ukraine The trouble with an aircraft accident that happens on the other side of the world for we Americans, especially one that occurs in a battle zone, is understanding which source speaks the truth about what’s…

On a two-wheeled vagabondage adventure, I reunited with my riding buddy in Seattle, and he’s leading us east toward Oshkosh. For those unfamiliar, vagabondage has a direction of travel, like east, but no route or itinerary. Except for one must-see s…

Fresh evidence has been uncovered in the disappearance of Malaysian flight 370 (MH370) according to The Telegraph of London. To date, there hasn’t been one single shred of physical evidence that proves any of the dozen or so theories about what hap…

Memorial Day here in the United States is one of the days we remember all the men and women who served and perished in armed conflicts around the world since our own Civil War in the mid-1800s. The stories emerging about how poorly we treat these me…

When the FAA tells you they’re changing the way they conduct business because they want to be more fair to someone, or that they want to save money, it’s probably time to duck. You can pretty much be sure that whatever they have in mind isn’t going …

I can’t believe I’m going to say something nice about the TSA again. That’s twice in a couple of months. I do think it’s worth mentioning that the TSA has actually created a product with value in their new TSA PreCheck card, part of the DHS’s Global…

Pardon our tardiness delivering this week’s episode, but we wanted to wait for our new logo to show up. Many thanks to @runwaygirl’s sister Anne Kirby and The Sweet Core crew for launching us into the 21st Century. On to the content. This week I’m f…

While it may seem to many of you as if the Malaysian Airlines 370 story has been going on forever, we’re really only into the opening scenes of this investigation. Remember it took two years to recover the data recorders from Air France 447. Lessons…

The past month has been one of amazement for most of us in the aviation industry as millions of people around the world try and figure out what happened to Malaysian Airlines flight 370. CNN decided to go 24/7 with MH370 coverage, while I was happy …

It’s time to get our listeners caught up on The Aviation Minute. Seems that working the kinks out of our new podcast turned out to be a bit more time consuming than I’d at first thought. Now that the iTunes folks tell us The Aviation Minute has …

James Bond creator Ian Fleming Ian Flemming and Tom Clancy, both master writers of suspense and political intrigue — and their alter egos James Bond and Jack Ryan respectively — are probably looking down from heaven in awe at the story created in Ma…

I know the TSA costs us billions every year, but for once, I think people need to appreciate them for the good things those folks do … especially in light of the possibilities that hijackers may have taken out Malaysian 370 last week. Rob Mark, Publ…

Regular Jetwhine readers might just remember a number of lively debates on this blog about what happened to Air France 447 over the South Atlantic in June 2009. A few of those conversations reached heated proportions too, with opinions … some from p…

Guns and airports don’t mix well … unless those weapons are being carried by law enforcement officers. Period. As the aviation industry evolves from an era of proactive problem solving to a search for more predictive solutions based on the tons of d…

Two Turkish airline pilots have gone missing. The aircraft they flew to Beirut on August 9 is just fine, as is their cabin crew, but these two men simply vanished into thin air … and almost no one is talking about them. Captain Murat Akpınar (L) an…

Looking back on the decade of my life I spent working at FAA I remember one thing for certain. When someone at the agency told me “No,” the reasons were seldom clear. “No,” might have meant something as simple as “No,” because I don’t agree with tha…