APA Wants Warning
Members of the Allied Pilots Association Union said the U.S. Transportation Administration should done more to warn in-air pilots about the failed terrorist attack on a Northwest Airlines flight Christmas Day.
Below is a copy of the letter sent to some APA members.
Fellow pilots,
We continue to examine the process by which intelligence about the Northwest Flight 253 event was disseminated from the Transportation Security Administration to the airlines and then to our airborne crews. Our initial investigation has found several communications failures.
The TSA should have mandated that information about this security event be passed on to all airborne flights. Instead, TSA specifically directed airlines to implement security measures for inbound trans-Atlantic flights.
At our airline, SOC complied with the instructions and sent the message only to the trans-Atlantic arrivals. APA believes that American Airlines should have sent this information to all airborne flights, so that all of our captains would have been aware of the threat and could have made the proper adjustments to their in-flight security procedures.
Further investigation has yielded additional information about why our pilots and airline were left out of the loop during this critical time. Initial reports of the event came to SOC via an FAA ATC conference call, rather than directly from the TSA. It is our understanding that American Airlines did not receive any official notification about this event from the TSA until the receipt of the Security Directive (SD) at around midnight on Dec. 25. According to our investigation, the first TSA conference call that management participated in concerning this event occurred on the evening of Dec. 26.
Clearly, we have seen a large-scale communications breakdown concerning this terrorist event. The APA Security Committee, in concert with the APA Government Affairs Committee, has been in contact with the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security to discuss these issues and suggest changes for the future to ensure that our crews are informed in a timely manner. To take the guesswork out of the process, we are recommending that the TSA mandate that airline managements immediately notify all airborne flights any time there is a Level 3 or Level 4 event. It is essential in times like these that we act swiftly to ensure our crews are prepared to thwart any terrorist attack.
Congress has expressed a desire to examine the issues associated with this event, and your APA Security Committee and APA Government Affairs Committee will bring all of these issues to its attention.
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