WASHINGTON — Many flight attendants say they haven’t been adequately taught to defend themselves or their passengers from terrorists because each airline offers different training for dealing with potential threats, a wire service reports.
Congress passed a law in November ordering transportation officials to develop training guidance for flight attendants. But some flight attendants say the guidelines that resulted are lax and allow as little as two hours of training.
“We’re really no more prepared to defend ourselves and to defend our passengers than we were on the morning of Sept. 11,” said Dawn Deeks, spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants, which represents 50,000 flight attendants.
About 100 union members, including United Airlines flight attendant Alice Hoglan, plan to lobby Congress for stricter self-defense training requirements on Thursday. Hoglan’s son, Mark Bingham, was among the passengers who officials believe fought with the hijackers on United Flight 93, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11.
The union surveyed the 26 airlines whose flight attendants it represents and found training ranged from two hours to 16 hours. Sometimes the training involved little more than lectures or video tapes, and some trainers focused on dealing with disruptive passengers rather than fighting off terrorists, the union said. According to the survey, one training program taught “verbal judo,” designed to redirect behavior through words.
The rules haven’t been made public for fear of helping terrorists. They reflect a change in philosophy to active resistance from the passive resistance taught before Sept. 11, according to Laura Brown, Federal Aviation Administration ( news – web sites) spokeswoman.
The rules describe different responses based on different levels of threat, instruct flight crews to issue precise commands and indicate that any passenger disturbance should be considered suspicious, she said.
They were worked out with significant input from flight attendants and pilots, Brown said.
Mollie Reiley, trustee for the local union chapter representing about 8,500 Northwest Airlines flight attendants, said the government’s training requirements aren’t comprehensive enough to give flight attendants confidence that they could protect themselves.
Members of the union, Teamsters Local 2000, asked Northwest for better training and got it. The airline agreed to pay flight attendants to take a voluntary eight-hour self-defense course from an Israeli security firm.
Reiley took the training. “It’s great,” she said. “You come out of it with a sense of, `Why be worried?'”
Alin Boswell, a US Airways flight attendant, said the training he got didn’t give him confidence that he could defend his passengers from a terrorist.
Boswell said his training included a 45-minute session in which six people in a large classroom pretended they were trying to protect themselves with items they could find in the cabin.
“It’s almost like we’re going to be MacGyver turning a stir stick into a lethal weapon,” he said, referring to the television character known for making weapons out of common items.
David Castelveter, US Airways spokesman, said the airline’s training procedures comply with Federal Aviation Administration and Transportation Security Administration directives on cabin security.
The House approved a bill that, besides allowing pilots to carry guns, spells out requirements for flight crew training that are stricter than those passed in November.
A Senate committee chaired by Sen. Ernest Hollings ( news, bio, voting record), D-S.C., will be discussing aviation security issues, including flight attendant training, on Sept. 10.
Hollings opposes guns in the cockpit, preferring to make the cockpit impenetrable. New bulletproof doors are scheduled to be installed in planes by April.
“He recognizes that if you’re going to achieve the goal of making sure the cockpit is impenetrable and inaccessible, then you have to give the flight attendants all the training they need,” said Andy Davis, Hollings spokesman.