Flying With Fish The Blog for Those Who Fly & Those Who Want to Fly Smarter

On the 23rd of January two tourists from the United Kingdom arrived at Los Angeles International Airport, on board Air France Flight 74 from Paris, for a vacation in Southern California. Instead of posting their trip to Twitter, comments made on Twitter got them deported. Under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Publicly Available [...]

Journalists have a tough job seeking out and reporting on stories. Gathering information as a journalist requires dedication, resources, a thick skin and the ability to build trust with your sources that they will remain protected. In the United States, a free press has been able to report on tough issues independent of government interference [...]

As the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) continues to expand the deployment of its Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) Teams, it is also increasingly mentioning Federal Air Marshals (FAM) as part of the agency’s ground based, non-airport focused, and security operation.   Looking past the legally questionable aspects of the TSA’s deployment of VIPR Teams, [...]

The airline industry is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world, despite the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 (Public Law 95-504).     Nearly every aspect of an airline’s operations are subject to regulation … but airlines are free to charge what they’d like for fares and services, provided they do not [...]

A few days ago I wrote about the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) teams, addressing the effectiveness and legal questionability of the TSA VIPR Program, in this post TSA VIPR Teams – Increase A Legally Questionable Failing Program.   This morning I received an email from a Department of Homeland [...]

Yesterday Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano announced that children, 12 and younger, would no longer be required to remove their shoes at Transportation Security Administration (TSA) security checkpoints and be able to have their hands swabbed for explosives rather than be subject to a pat down.   The TSA’s move to allow children to [...]

At the start of May Texas State Representative David Simpson (R-Longview) introduced Texas House Bill 1937, a bill that would make it a felony for Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Transportation Security Officers (TSO) to touch a person’s genitals, or breasts, during a security pat down without probable cause during an ‘enhanced putdown.’   Since writing [...]

Texan State Representative David Simpson (R-Longview) has taken an interesting stance on the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) ‘enhanced pat downs’ and has recently introduced Texas House Bill 1937 that would make it a criminal offense for TSA Transportation Security Officers (TSO), or anyone for that matter, to touch a person’s genitals, or breasts, during a [...]

POST EDITED ON 10-MARCH-2011 : CORRECT AN ERROR IN THE FINANCIAL NUMBERS CAUSED BY A SPELL CHECKER The Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) budget is enormous, but is the agency prioritizing and allocating its funds in the most effective manner? At present the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lists the TSA’s budget at US$8,164,780,000 with US$7,910,780,000 [...]

This morning in Las Vegas, where people go to roll the dice and play their luck, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) began testing L3 Systems ProVision ATD software loaded into their Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) millimeter wave technology scanners. The current generation of AIT scanner software in use in by the TSA has been highly [...]