Minimum wage and self importance

[expat]

This is what minimum wage and self importance gets you. Never underestimate how authorised an unorthorised person can feel when carrying out daily duties, when they have a name badge and a uniform.

TSA inspector damages and grounds 9 aircraft

Best quote, "Stated that no aircraft were tampered with, and thereafter attempted to minimise the issue by stating that a TSA Inspector "may have touched" the aircraft... which American Eagle "sorta" objected to".

Matt

[Hagar]

Never underestimate how authorised an unorthorised person can feel when carrying out daily duties, when they have a name badge and a uniform.

These people scare me.

[Brett_Henderson]

This is going to get worse, before it gets better.

[expat]

This is going to get worse, before it gets better.  It's the comical combination of government incompetence and union unaccountability.

The club in Ohio had a run-in with one of these "Cliffys" (mailman character on the sitcom Cheers). He went babbling on with some laughable tone of authority in his voice, about how he could shut us down and fine the airport because we didn't have a padlock on the gate that comes up to one of our hangars (20 yards from the hangar, the fence just ends and we walk around it regularly when that end is closer to a parked plane than the gate itself).

Yes, Cliffy's can be found in just about every occupation today. Generally, the way to calm them down is to request/demand that their line manager is brought into the conversation.........saying that I have come across line managers that are even more Cliffy than the Cliff that was the first problem. Just keep going higher. At some point (mostly) common sense prevails.

Matt

[DaveSims]

This happened here just a couple of years ago.  TSA decided they needed to do and airfield security check, and went through the hangars and many people's aircraft without permission, including some very, very expensive aircraft.  These TSA idiots don't even know how to operate aircraft doors on some planes and could have damaged some expensive hardware in the process.  TSA has taken their authority too far and no one seems to care.  And just like you mentioned earlier about locked gates, whats the point of a locked gate when the end of the fence is just 20 feet away?  We have a similar situation here.  What I love most is how they complain about pilot's leaving the keys in some planes.  Little do they know, many newer aircraft don't have keys, just buttons to start the plane.  But I bet they couldn't figure that out either.

[Willit Run]

D'oh!!  Idiot!!