To both your posts, robynari....
The situation was not under control as long as Guerrero had the bomb, and a reasonable person under those circumstances could have decided that the guy coming out of the bathroom had a better chance at that moment of getting the bomb than the pilot had.
No one said the situation was under control, at least in the sense of the crisis being over, but the Captain had calmed Guerrero down and he was clearly about to hand the briefcase over when the man walked out of the bathroom and idiot-boy yelled to grab the guy.
To the claim that a reasonable person
might decide the man coming out of the bathroom had a better chance: (a) this can be discredited because Guerrero was plainly about to turn over the bomb, and (b) the bathroom guy was obviously unaware of what was happening, so it was demonstrably
not reasonable to believe an untrained individual, chancing into a situation of which he had no knowledge and at best only a couple of seconds to act, and with only a loudmouthed nobody yelling something at him, would have had a better chance to disarm the bomber than the pilot.
In any case this is largely moot. By abruptly screaming about grabbing Guerrero, the jerk was interfering with the Captain's efforts to resolve the situation and deliberately disobeying the Captain's order that everyone sit down and remain quiet. What followed was directly his fault.
Except at the time, he observed Gwen being rather bitchy to Guerrero's seat mate and then that Guerrero's suitcase was stolen.
So what? That didn't confer any right on him to intervene in her actions.
The idea that flight crews can act with carte blanche isn't just theory either.
Um, which as you wrote it means that it's a
fact that flight crews have
carte blanche to act as they wish. I suspect you may have meant the opposite, but whatever, I don't agree with that. But they do have the right to order passengers what to do aboard the plane, especially in matters of safety, where their authority is pretty much absolute. Passengers have no right to interfere with a crew's operation of an airplane -- period.
It would make it practically impossible for him to be prosecuted since his defense would be that 1) before he knew that the suitcase was armed, he relied on the airline and security to keep dangerous devices off the plane, and their case against him would be "sorry, but we screwed up, so you're toast" and 2)after he knew that the suitcase had a bomb inside, he should have relied on the crew to retrieve the bomb and/or for Guerrero to surrender it when Guerrero was desperate and homicidal enough to bring it on the flight and the authorities weren't competent enough to prevent him from doing so.
He might raise these points in his defense, but they would not preclude a prosecution of him for his own acts. You're conflating what his crimes were with his defense, or with his claims in his own potential lawsuit against the airline for negligence and so forth. Even granting the validity of your points 1 and 2, this has nothing to do with whether he could or should be
prosecuted.
Your #1 would be an argument in his defense or in a lawsuit. Number 2, however, has
no validity because the crew
was in the midst of getting Guerrero to surrender when he intervened and blew the whole thing -- literally.
In other words the case against the jerk is that he refused to rely on people who had proven themselves unreliable.
No, the case against him is that he wrecked whatever chance there was to get Guerrero to surrender peacefully by deliberately disobeying the Captain's orders and interfering with his command during an emergency. And the crew themselves
were reliable -- the screw-up in letting Guerrero aboard was on the ground personnel, not the flight crew.
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