CHICAGO -(Dow Jones)- Members of the Allied Pilots Association, the pilots’ union at American Airlines, said Wednesday that the U.S. Transportation Security Administration didn’t do enough to warn in-air flight crews of the Christmas Day terrorist threat on a Northwest Airlines flight.
In a letter to American Airlines pilots, the APA called for better communications at the time of potential security threats. “Some pilots were left out of the loop” when the TSA told management at American, a unit of AMR Corp. ( AMR), and other airlines, to contact only the pilots of inbound transatlantic flights. The Northwest flight came into Detroit from Amsterdam. To ensure overall safety, “The TSA should have mandated that information about this security event be passed on to all airborne flights,” the APA Government Affairs Committee wrote.
Even if you buy Janet Napolitano’s unbelievable incompetence and spin when she explained that when she said “the system worked like clockwork” was meant to reference the after-incident response, that is now in dispute as well.
In other words, we’ll have another “statement” from her, and probably another television appearance by President Obama to “clarify” things again.
No matter how you slice it, the system failed. Badly.