Where Were the Air Marshals? None on Disrupted London Flight

I’ll bet they show up on payday.

Tell your husband to quit whining. If he was a real man he would have joined the USSS years ago and now he could be a supervisor working a four hour workday in the FAMS. Sounds like he is an amateur.
He needs to shut up and have a better attitude about our little country club.

As soon as the FAM service management found out that overtime was authorized, most London missions were cancelled.
Many FAMS were begging to cover those London flights but instead were left covering the usual 10 hour day flights that an outdated computer program selected at random.
This is all done to ensure that management can display that “they” fly more minutes than any other office.
Of course “they” are not the ones who are actually flying.
Even on Red alert, the FAM management is more concerned about their next Power-Point presentation containing meaningless statistical data that makes the public no safer. all this, in order to justify their “merit” pay and bonuses.
Why was the flight not covered? Because there was already a checkmark next to that part of next years appraisal.
. Deployed enhanced personnel resources to London for red alert in August.
Managements’ quest for bonuses has lead to bad policy, unsustainable schedules, and massive recruitment and retention issues.
Is it acceptable to the public that seasoned highly qualified Federal Air Marshals who leave in disgust are being “replaced” with baggage screeners AKA (Transportation Security Officers)?
Are the F-16′s going to give these newly hired baggage screeners a chance to retake the plane from the hijackers? Can they take that chance?
Certainly something to think about, especially if you are on that plane!!!!
Message to Director Dana Brown. Retention should be your number one priority. The only way to do this is to bring back a reasonable work schedule similar to the one that attracted all of the highly trained seasoned operatives that were hired after 9/11.
Failure to retain competant operatives will inevidably lead to lack of confidence in FAM service ability to retake the plane. Federal Air Marshal should be considered the last line of defense, not the F-16s.
Your (Director Brown)lack of action in implementing retention policies could lead to the order that nobody wants to give and no pilot wants to hear.
“Shoot it down”

if you need to look at a system that works….look at El Al….but they take terrorists seriously!

Lyle,
The problem with your theory is that the FAM management no longer considers the flying FAMs to be “counter-terrorism” instead they are viewed by management and constantly reminded that they are security guards and nothing more.
If there was a team aboard, they would be facing disciplinary action for not acting. That is the sad truth.
When the program was serious (before the retired Secret Service agents began ruining it) staying undercover was, in fact, a top priority.
You have to understand that the FAM service has deteriorated into a statistical driven agency.
The reason no FAM team was on that London flight is because managements imaginery quota had already been met in their own minds.
If anything had actually occured, they can point to all the flights they covered the days before and say “we enhanced coverage”
What they won’t tell you of course is that their self imposed (ala bonus money) domestic routes still needed to be covered. Therefore, they cancelled all the London trips in order to accomodate this make believe domestic quota. Keep in mind that these low-threat level domestic routes were randomly computer generated based on ten hour days well before the London
incident occured.
My husband was begging to cover the London flights but never got the opportunity. Instead, guys who didn’t want to go were called on their days off. Then they were told they would not get paid for their time since it was not a “scheduled” flight.
As soon as the FAM service realized that they would not get away with this, and would have to pay overtime, the FAM coverage on all the London flights from my husbands office was mysteriously cancelled.
Lyle, your observation was logical and it is certainly what a reasonable person might conclude.
However, its premise is faultyh and leads the public to a false sense of security. The public pays for this program to be a last line of defense.
FAMs need to be on routes where the threat is, not where an outdated computer program can calculate out ten hours!!

Catherine Mayo, who forced the plane down with fighter jets has been glossed over as just hysterical.
However TSA should delve into her background more. Catherine Mayo is a journalist based in Pakistan writing for the Muslim Paskistani Daily Times. Flying home from Pakistan, she stopped in London. That causes me to wonder why was she flying from London to DC if she was enroute to her residence in Vermont?
Mayo’s son, Josh, 31, described his mother as a peace activist and said she had been in Pakistan since March. She has traveled there often since making a pen pal before Sept. 11, 2001. The pen pal hasn’t been allowed to visit the United States. I further wonder who is her pen pal and why he isn’t allowed to visit the U.S.
I couldn’t find out where she was born but she taught in the UK East Midlands Area at the Hillcrest Community School, Gainsborough where she received the Guardian Award for Outstanding New Teacher in 2002. Fifty-nine year old Mayo is largely unknown to her neighbors where she rents a former schoolhouse in Braintree, VT; but is “more familiar” in Northfield where she previously lived with her ex-husband and three children.

I near the top of the flight attendant seniority list for a major airlines and fly mostly international flights. We are introduced to the FAMs so we know where they are situated. In no way we can recognize them without the introductions – only guess, and that is exactly what that reporter was doing by claiming having found eight FAMs on board! What a phony claim! The only way a reporter will ever know how many FAMs are on a flight is to count them after they take out a real terrorist(s) – not some lady who peed on the floor. This could have been a diversion to find out who and where the FAMs are.