Confusion regarding stowaway incident doesn’t fly

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It’s getting harder to trust anybody when it comes to how a teenager apparently snuck into a US Airways airplane wheel well at Charlotte/Douglas International Airport in November.

The whole thing just stinks like a dirty airplane bathroom.

First, the airport’s aviation director, Jerry Orr, in December said the airport didn’t plan to conduct any special reviews of the airport’s security in the wake of the incident, in which a North Mecklenburg High School student is thought to have snuck into the wheel well of a Boeing 737 and fallen out over the flight path to Boston Logan International Airport. The story garnered lots of negative national — and, perhaps, international — news coverage for Charlotte.

To many in the public, it was worrisome that Charlotte/Douglas officials didn’t break the speed of sound to launch their own investigation of the breach, that the airport was just fine, thank you very much, with letting the feds or the folks in Massachusetts look into it. The airport should have been all over that like white on rice, some thought. After all, it happened right under their noses.

In the end, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department would oversee the local investigation.

So there was that, and that was troubling enough to many.

Fast forward to last week, when a news story comes out claiming that although the city has been saying that the federal government had ordered that the investigation be classified, the Transportation Security Administration said it never told the city to classify it. In fact, TSA said it never even saw the report, according to the story.

So, just when you start thinking that everything has begun flying right when it comes to the investigation, you find this out. Great. Who are we supposed to believe, TSA or the city?

Someone apparently is not telling the truth, TSA or the city: Did TSA tell the city to classify the information, or did the city just make that up? In an case, TSA and the city don’t appear to be communicating well. My, what a comforting thought, in an era when enemies of the U.S. are constantly trying to figure out how to harm our citizens.

Airport security is supposed to be extremely tight these days, thanks to terrorists wanting to fly planes into our buildings and all. In the U.S., screeners make all would-be passengers — from babies to adults — remove our shoes and jackets. We have the aggravation of having to remove our laptops from their bags before they are screened. We are restricted as to the amount of liquids we can bring on a plane (I’m surprised TSA doesn’t limit the amount of liquid you can have in your stomach upon boarding a plane yet. Perhaps such a restriction is around the corner.)

Indeed, the only person who should be capable of doing something so impressive — scratch that, miraculous — as sneaking onto a runway and stowing away in a plane’s wheel well is a shape-shifter, and, as far as I know, such entities exist only in the world of science fiction.

In other words, no one except God should be able to sneak into a plane’s wheel well these days. And I’m sure he’d much prefer to fly in first class, or perhaps near the bathroom in case he had to go.

What the public needs right now out of this investigation into the death of Delvonte Tisdale are answers and assurances that security is as tight as it can be at Charlotte/Douglas.

What we don’t need are news stories that leave us confused, troubled and wondering whether we can trust the authorities in our own city. The back and forth between TSA and the city is perplexing. Even Einstein might have felt the need to break out his violin to ponder the complexities of all of this.

It was sad to hear that the Tisdale incident happened. It’s even more sad now that the investigation appears to be shrouded in lies and/or a lack of communication between the feds and the city.

Editor Deon Roberts can be reached at deon.roberts@mecktimes.com.