But midway through the journey, a man in coach stood up and headed toward the front of the plane. Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, seated in row 11, happened to glance up from her book to see the man striding toward the cockpit door. Suddenly, two undercover sky marshals in first class tackled the man, later identified as Raho Ortiz. Then, guns drawn, they flashed ID before asking other passengers to put their heads in their laps and their hands on their heads. “It happened so fast,” Stabenow recalled. “It took a couple of minutes for people to realize something had happened.”
Stabenow is one of the few American travelers to see the nation’s highly trained sky marshals in action. So far, only a limited number of the marshals are airborne, mainly on flights into and out of Washington’s Reagan National Airport. But under an airline security plan finally passed by both houses of Congress on Friday, the number of sky marshals will increase dramatically. It will take time to hire and train more marshals, but lawmakers hope that, within a year, they’ll be operating on many flights–especially high-risk, cross-country flights like the ones hijacked on September 11. “We need air marshals on every flight–not just flights into Washington,” says Stabenow. The new airline security plan will also put baggage screeners on the government payroll, strengthen cockpit doors, require all luggage be checked for explosives and allow pilots to carry certain types of weapons. President Bush plans to sign the new law on Monday, probably at National Airport.
Once the sky marshals on Stabenow’s flight had tackled Ortiz, the pilot announced that the plane was being diverted to Washington’s more distant airport, Washington Dulles, some 30 miles away. “The plane went down quite sharply,” Stabenow recalled. When the flight finally landed, flashing police cars surrounded it on the tarmac. Passengers were told to put their arms out in front of them. “They wanted to see everybody’s hands,” Stabenow said. A third sky marshal who’d been sitting behind Stabenow retrieved Ortiz’s luggage from the overhead bin. A lawyer for the Environmental Protection Agency, Ortiz later told officials that he had just been trying to go to the bathroom. (He was later charged with possession of marijuana.) But Stabenow and the other passengers didn’t seem to mind the false alarm. “I don’t think the air marshals overreacted,” she said. No one knew why Ortiz was heading toward the front of the plane. “Given the circumstances, I would want them to react that way,” she said.
Watching the professionalism of the sky marshals in action just confirmed Stabenow’s belief that federal law enforcement officials should take over the nation’s air security. “It was a poignant reminder of what we were trying to do and why it’s important,” she said. Even though Stabenow’s close encounter with the marshals came on the same day an American Airlines jet crashed into a residential New York City neighborhood, Stabenow has no hesitation about boarding another flight this weekend. “I feel more confident,” she said. “There is no way what happened on September 11 could happen with the air marshals we had on that flight.” But for now, with only a few marshals patrolling the nation’s skies and many other provisions of the airline security plan still months away, the new law may do little to calm nervous fliers this holiday season.
