On Thursday evening, a
40-year-old man — with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign
accent — boarded a plane. It was a regional jet making a short hop from
Philadelphia to nearby Syracuse.
The curly-haired man scribbled
on his notepad. His seatmate, a blond-haired, 30-something looked him over. He
was wearing navy Diesel jeans and a red Lacoste sweater but something
about him didn’t seem right to her.
She decided to try out
some small talk.
Is Syracuse home? She
asked.
No, he replied curtly.
He appeared
too focused on the task at hand, those strange scribblings.
The woman began reading
her book. Or pretending to read, anyway. Shortly after boarding had finished,
she flagged down a flight attendant and handed that crew-member a
note of her own.
Then the
passengers waited, and waited, and waited for the flight to take off.
After they’d sat on the tarmac for about half an hour, the flight attendant
approached the female passenger again and asked if she now felt okay to
fly, or if she was “too sick.”
I’m OK to fly, the woman
responded.
American Airlines flight
3950 remained grounded, though.
Then, for unknown
reasons, the plane turned around and headed back to the gate. The
woman was soon escorted off the plane. On the intercom a crew member
announced that there was paperwork to fill out, or fuel to refill, or some
other flimsy excuse.
The wait continued.
Finally the pilot came
by, and approached the real culprit behind the delay: that curly-haired foreign
man. He was now escorted off the plane, too, and taken to meet an agent.
What do you know about
your seatmate? The agent asked the foreign-sounding man.
Well, she acted a bit
funny, he replied, but she didn’t seem visibly ill. Maybe, he thought, they
wanted his help in piecing together what was wrong with her.
And then the big reveal:
The woman wasn’t really sick at all. She had seen her seatmate’s cryptic
notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or
some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens
of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She felt it her duty to
alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent
informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.
The curly-haired man
laughed.
He laughed because
those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or another foreign language, or even some
special secret terrorist code. They were math.
Yes, math. A
differential equation, to be exact.
The
suspected terrorist was Guido Menzio, a young but decorated Ivy League
economist, best known for his relatively technical
work on search theory, which helped earn him a tenured associate
professorship at the University of Pennsylvania as well as stints at
Princeton and Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
He’s Italian, not Middle
Eastern, or whatever heritage usually gets ethnically profiled on flights
these days.
Menzio
had been on the first leg of a connecting flight to Ontario, where he had to give
a talk at Queen’s University.
Menzio
showed the authorities his calculations and was allowed to
return to his seat.
Soon
after, the flight finally took off, more than two hours after its
scheduled departure time for what would be just a 41-minute trip in the air,
according to flight-tracking data.
The woman never
reboarded to the flight.
Casey Norton,
a spokesman for American Airlines said the woman had indeed initially
told the crew she was sick, but when she deplaned she disclosed that
the reason she was feeling ill was her concern about the behavior of
her seatmate. At that time, she requested to be rebooked on another flight.
The crew then called for security personnel, who interviewed Menzio and
determined him not to be a “credible threat.” Norton was not allowed to
give out her name for privacy reasons.
Whenever there are
conflicts between passengers, Norton said, “we try to work with them peacefully
to resolve it,” whether that means changing seat assignments or
switching someone to take a different flight. When asked how often
customers raise similar suspicions about fellow passengers that turn out
to be unfounded, he said it happens “from time to time” but declined to provide
details about frequency.
Menzio for his part says
he was “treated respectfully throughout,” though he remains baffled and
frustrated by a “broken system that does not collect information
efficiently.” He is troubled by the ignorance of his fellow passenger, as well
as “A security protocol that is too rigid–in the sense that once the whistle is
blown everything stops without checks–and relies on the input of people who may
be completely clueless. ”
Rising xenophobia, he
suggested, may soon make things worse for people who happen to look a
little other-ish.
The professor also shared another observation from his time at airports on Facebook. One couple approached him just weeks ago and asker for his autograph thinking he was Sean Lennon - John's son.
In this true parable of
2016 I see another worrisome lesson: That in America today, the only thing
more terrifying than foreigners is…math.
