Was the situation unfortunate? Yes.

Were the nine passengers who were pulled off the flight innocent? It’s very likely.

Will there be litigation or a settlement as a result? Maybe….maybe not. We don’t know. The law is most likely on the side of AirTran but the fiduciary penalties of even successfully defending potential lawsuits resulting from this incident may make settling out of court the better deal.

Regarding your question, “Where was [AirTran] management?” Like you, I wasn’t there so I don’t know but it wouldn’t be a stretch to believe that they were right at the terminal counter beside the agents trying their best to handle these 9 aggrieved passengers (who were inconvenienced and embarrassed but given full refunds) in addition to 95 other angry and inconvenienced passengers who had places to go and things to do. Can you even imagine what it must have been like for those gate agents and their supervisors? Apparently, you can’t.

Is air travel a pretty miserable experience these days for everyone involved? Yes….anybody who travels frequently has probably had the unpleasant experience of being detained on more than one occasion.

Did ISPS get way out of his lane and comment on something it’s pretty evident he knows nothing about? Most definitely.

I don’t like it when some knuckle-dragging national sports talk guy damns all the progress MLS has made in the last 10+ years after pulling a few recent Beck’s quotes about quality of play out of context. And that’s football….it’s just a game that I happen to love. You, on the other hand still see nothing wrong with slandering an entire company, employing thousands of hard-working Americans, for essentially doing exactly what it was supposed to do.

I’m done. It’s your site and you can have the last word.

Believe it or not, I visit here and all the other DP sites daily after the kids are in bed. I enjoy it and don’t regularly comment at all but this spun me up. Thanks for the continued football media. I enjoy it all. Happy New Year.

I usually don’t respond in full like this to comments, but I feel obligated to because initially this was not meant to be a holier than thou post at all. I have no problems in any way with the security measures taken by AirTran, the FBI, the TSA and the local law enforcement involved. I just find it interesting how this whole thing played and will play out in the coming weeks. The reason they are going to end up settling out of court for some insane amount of money is for reasons that had nothing to do with the initial security issue. The problem comes when they as a company fail to handle the situation appropriately after these United States citizens(all but one in the party were American Born) cleared security, and that is AirTrans fault. Where was management? If they felt that this family was such a threat, you would think that they would have been on top of things and known the progress of detained and being interrogated CUSTOMERS of theirs. To say that they couldn’t accommodate them because they hadn’t been notified of clearance yet, to me, is ridiculous. You can ask my crew, I have been on the detained and interrogated or held back from the group end of things more than once in situations similar to this. I usually don’t have a problem with it until after they find out everything is all good, but they still want to f#$% with me. When things like this happen one can’t just look at this as an isolated incident that happened in a vacuum and forget about it because it happened to some people that i don’t even know this time. These were United States citizens that were born here and pay taxes; who is to say that the next time this happens its not me or you.