Something you won't see reported in the news...yet!

[M.D. Holloway]

I can not confirm nor deny this accuracy of this e-mail.

Something you won't see reported in the news...yet!

I, Gene Hackemack, received this email from my good friend Tedd Petruna, a diver at the NBL facility [Neutral Buoyancy Lab], at NASA Houston, whom I used to work with. Tedd happened to be on this same Flt. 297, Atlanta to Houston .


In my opinion, the muslims are all getting very brave now, since they have a Muslim sympathizer in the white house......read Tedd's story below.



Semper Fi
Gene Hackemack

PS...can you imagine, our own news media now are so politically correct that they are afraid to report that these were all muslims...unbelievable. Thank God for people like Tedd Petruna.





----- Original Message -----
From: Petruna, Tedd J. (JSC-DX12)[RAYTHEON TECHNICAL SERVICES COMPANY]
To: undisclosed-recipients
Sent: Friday, November 27, 2009 11:32 AM
Subject: Long story short....



One week ago, I went to Ohio on business and to see my father. On Tuesday, November the 17th, I returned home. If you read the papers the 18th you may have seen a blurb where a AirTran flight was cancelled from Atlanta to Houston due to a man who refused to get off of his cell phone before takeoff. It was on Fox.

This was NOT what happened.

I was in 1st class coming home. 11 Muslim men got on the plane in full attire. 2 sat in 1st class and the rest peppered themselves throughout the plane all the way to the back. As the plane taxied to the runway the stewardesses gave the safety spiel we are all so familiar with. At that time, one of the men got on his cell and called one of his companions in the back and proceeded to talk on the phone in Arabic very loudly and very aggressively. This took the 1st stewardess out of the picture for she repeatedly told the man that cell phones were not permitted at the time. He ignored her as if she was not there.

The 2nd man who answered the phone did the same and this took out the 2nd stewardess. In the back of the plane at this time, 2 younger Muslims, one in the back aisle, and one in front of him, window, began to show footage of a porno they had taped the night before, and were very loud about it. Now..they are only permitted to do this prior to Jihad. If a Muslim man goes into a strip club, he has to view the woman via mirror with his back to her. (don't ask me..I don't make the rules, but I've studied) The 3rd stewardess informed them that they were not to have electronic devices on at this time. To which one of the men said "shut up infidel dog!" She went to take the camcorder and he began to scream in her face in Arabic. At that exact moment, all 11 of them got up and started to walk the cabin. This is where I had had enough! I got up and started to the back where I heard a voice behind me from another Texan twice my size say "I got your back." I grabbed the man who had been on the phone by the arm and said "you WILL go sit down or you Will be thrown from this plane!" As I "led" him around me to take his seat, the fellow Texan grabbed him by the back of his neck and his waist and headed out with him. I then grabbed the 2nd man and said, "You WILL do the same!" He protested but adrenaline was flowing now and he was going to go. As I escorted him forward the plane doors open and 3 TSA agents and 4 police officers entered. Me and my new Texan friend were told to cease and desist for they had this under control. I was happy to oblige actually. There was some commotion in the back, but within moments, all 11 were escorted off the plane. They then unloaded their luggage.

We talked about the occurrence and were in disbelief that it had happen, when suddenly, the door open again and on walked all 11!! Stone faced, eyes front and robotic (the only way I can describe it). The stewardess from the back had been in tears and when she saw this, she was having NONE of it! Being that I was up front, I heard and saw the whole ordeal. She told the TSA agent there was NO WAY she was staying on the plane with these men. The agent told her they had searched them and were going to go through their luggage with a fine tooth comb and that they were allowed to proceed to Houston . The captain and co-captain came out and told the agent "we and our crew will not fly this plane!" After a word or two, the entire crew, luggage in tow, left the plane. 5 minutes later, the cabin door opened again and a whole new crew walked on.

Again...this is where I had had enough!!! I got up and asked "What the hell is going on!?!?" I was told to take my seat. They were sorry for the delay and I would be home shortly. I said "I'm getting off this plane". The stewardess sternly told me that she could not allow me to get off. (now I'm mad!) I said "I am a grown man who bought this ticket, whose time is mine with a family at home and I am going through that door, or I'm going through that door with you under my arm!! But I am going through that door!!" And I heard a voice behind me say "so am I". Then everyone behind us started to get up and say the same. Within 2 minutes, I was walking off that plane where I was met with more agents who asked me to write a statement. I had 5 hours to kill at this point so why the hell not. Due to the amount of people who got off that flight, it was cancelled. I was supposed to be in Houston at 6pm. I got here at 12:30am.

Look up the date. Flight #297 Atlanta to Houston .

If this wasn't a dry run, I don't know what one is. The terrorists wanted to see how TSA would handle it, how the crew would handle it, and how the passengers would handle it.

I'm telling this to you because I want you to know..
The threat is real. I saw it with my own eyes..

-Tedd Petruna

[M.D. Holloway]

Snopes did have something...also here is an article:

FAA to investigate cell phone use on Atlanta flight
ShareThisPrint E-mail By Alexis Stevens and Kristi Swartz


The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating what led to the two-and-a-half hour delay of a Tuesday flight from Atlanta to Houston, an agency spokeswoman said Wednesday morning.


An AirTran spokesman said a man traveling with a group Tuesday afternoon refused to turn his cell phone off before takeoff. But the woman sitting behind the man said it wasn't a phone at all, and feels the entire incident was the result of poor communication.

"He was not talking on a cell phone, it was a camera," said Nancy Deveikis of Marietta. "He was looking at pictures."

A flight attendant asked the man twice to turn off the device, Deveikis said. But it was clear the man did not speak English, she said. Although the man was traveling with others, the rest of the group was seated throughout the plane.

When the man did not respond to the flight attendant, she took the camera from him, Deveikis said. Deveikis, who presented ajc.com with her boarding pass for the flight, said she watched the exchange from directly behind the man in seat 28A and the female flight attendant.

"She grabbed it from his hand and basically said I'll be holding this until you get off the plane,"Deveikis said.

It’s unclear whether he was talking on the phone, snapping photos or texting, AirTran spokesman Christopher White said. But to airline officials and flight attendants, it didn’t matter. The Boeing 717 had pulled away from the gate, and the phone was on, White said.

“Flight attendants were telling him, ‘Turn off the phone, turn off the phone,’” White said.

“We can’t taxi with the cell phone on, and we certainly can’t take off,” White said. “Language barrier or not, you start to butt up against interfering with a flight crew.”

Deveikis said she never heard the one flight attendant use the word "phone" when speaking to the man.

“Passengers are required to follow instructions of the flight attendants," regional FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said. AirTran reported the incident to the FAA, Bergen said. The federal Transportation Security Administration will not handle the incident, saying it is a customer-service issue between the passenger and the airline, a TSA spokesman said.

Houston-bound Flight 297 was scheduled to leave Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport at 4:40 p.m. Tuesday. But the pilot decided to return the plane back to the gate, and the man and the group he was traveling with were asked to exit the plane.

Another person in the group – someone who could speak English – got off as well to act as an interpreter, White said.

So, why didn’t he leave his seat to help in the first place?

“He told flight attendants that he could have helped during the taxi time, but he didn’t want to get up,” as passengers are to be seated at that time, White said.

Deveikis said the flight attendant who took the phone told other members of the group, "If you're English-speaking, then maybe you should get off the plane, too."

Another flight attendant, Deveikis said, was in tears as she left the plane following the incident. A new crew later returned to fly the plane, she said.

AirTran gave the 72 other passengers on the plane the option to stay on that flight or switch to another one without paying any fees, White said. Of the remaining passengers on the plane, 12 decided to take another flight.

The 11 others in the 13-passenger group got back on the plane, which took off for Houston, White said. TSA officials spoke to the man with the electronic device as well as the other person who was acting as an interpreter, and they took a later flight to Houston, White said.

Deveikis said she remembers the original members of the group reboarding.

Deveikis, who often flies to Houston for business, chose to remain on the flight. She said the man with the camera and his entire group reboarded the plane. The whole incident, which scared other passengers who weren't clear what was happening, could have easily been avoided.

"Just one flight attendant snowed everyone into believing she had an irate passenger," Deveikis said.

Still, airline officials contend the right action was taken.

“It’s a fine line that we have to play,” White said. “Is there any safety or security reason to bring the plane back? Yes, there was a safety reason.”

White declined to identify the passenger. No charges were filed. And, for AirTran, the case is closed.

“Once we determine there is no other problem, it’s our responsibility to get everyone back on and get the plane taken off as quickly as we can,” White said.

Staff writer Megan Matteucci contributed to this report.

[pwd72s]

Passed on to my retired American airlines pilot buddy...asked him if he'd heard anything. My email title was "Truth or BS???"

[Tishabet]

Press says the guy who wrote the email wasn't even on the plane:
AirTran ‘hero' wasn't on plane, airline says *| ajc.com

[sammyg2]

15 seconds worth of free googling found this:

AirTran ‘hero' wasn't on plane, airline says
By Alexis Stevens
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

It's a little easier to understand why a Houston man who claimed to have thwarted a potential terrorist attack on a flight leaving Atlanta has not answered repeated requests to tell his story.

He was not on the plane, AirTran Airways says.

"After conducting additional research into this situation, we have verified, according to flight manifests [legally binding documents] that the individual that allegedly created a first-hand account of events on-board AirTran Airways Flight 297, a Theodore Petruna, was never actually on-board the flight," AirTran said in a statement, which the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was the first to obtain.

An e-mail from a Tedd Petruna, in which he told the AJC via a Facebook message Friday was intended only for friends and family, made the rounds online this week after a friend apparently forwarded it to others. In a matter of days, Petruna's account appeared in chat rooms and blogs and on conspiracy theorists' Web sites.

The AJC was forwarded the e-mail dozens of times this week, as readers saw Petruna's tale and noticed conflicting information between it and earlier news reports of the flight delay Nov. 17. Some readers simply asked the AJC to further investigate the matter.

But others who forwarded the message accused the AJC of participating in a politically correct cover-up.

The intriguing story made for intense fodder among bloggers.

Petruna's story appeared in a blog on the Web site for The Project 9.12, a group started by Fox News commentator Glenn Beck. A Canadian news site picked up the story. Dallas Morning News airline columnist Terry Maxon made it the subject of his blog for a second time this week on Friday. And snopes.com, a Web site that sniffs out rumors to decipher between fact and fiction, followed the story.

In its continued investigation into the incident, the AJC made several attempts to speak to Petruna about the incident. He has declined throughout the week to respond to repeated e-mail and phone attempts by the AJC to talk to him. That last request was made Saturday.

Additionally, AJC interviews with people on the plane, airline officials and federal agencies did not corroborate his story.

According to AirTran, shortly after 4:40 p.m. on Nov. 17, Flight 297 bound for Houston taxied toward the runway of Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. But before the Boeing 717 made it to the runway, the pilot decided to return the plane to the gate. A flight attendant had apparently asked a male passenger twice to put away a cellphone or camera, but the man had not done so. The flight attendant then took the device from the man.

At the gate, the passenger -- who didn't speak English -- and a companion were asked to leave the plane, which they did without incident, the airline reported.

When it was determined the problem was caused by a language barrier, AirTran and Transportation Security Administration officials allowed the man, and 12 others traveling with him, to reboard, and the flight left for Houston a little more than two hours later. Later, officials said the entire incident was the result of a miscommunication.

Nancy Deveikis was seated directly behind the unidentified man on the flight. She believes he spoke Spanish. Deveikis said the man was looking at pictures on a camera and did not understand the flight attendant's requests to turn the device off.

Petruna's account was drastically different. It was forwarded to others by A. Gene Hackemack, who vouched for him as a former NASA colleague. Petruna claimed he witnessed an incident involving Middle Eastern passengers on the flight and attempted to stop the incident from escalating.

"I grabbed the man who had been on the phone by the arm and said ‘you will go sit down or you will be thrown from this plane,' " Petruna wrote. Continuing, Petruna said 11 men dressed in "full attire" speaking Arabic got on the plane together.

Hackemack, when reached by telephone earlier this week at his Texas home, stood by the story and gave the AJC a home phone number for Petruna. Hackemack did not respond to a request for comment Friday by the AJC.

"Thank God for people like Tedd Petruna," wrote Hackemack wrote in the e-mail he forwarded.

Keith Robinson didn't make it to the gate in time to board Flight 297 for its initial attempt to depart. Robinson, a Texas chaplain, said he watched as upset crew members and passengers poured back into the terminal after the incident on the plane.

"You could tell something was going on," Robinson told the AJC. Robinson said a passenger getting off the plane asked him whether he intended to get on the plane and fly to Houston.

"I'm a chaplain, that's where I'm supposed to be," Robinson said he told the man.

Robinson said the flight to Houston was a quiet one, giving him time to write down his account of what he had seen.

"The feeling that I have from what I observed is there was intentional intimidation," Robinson said. "It was almost an ethnic bullying situation."

Robinson recounted what he witnessed for reporters at KHOU-TV in Houston on Thursday. Petruna, however, told the station that he could not appear on camera.

In an e-mail to the AJC Saturday evening, Robinson said whether or not Petruna was on the flight, the incident aboard the plane caused fear among the flight's crew members.

A replacement flight crew was brought on board, but that is not uncommon, AirTran said. A delay such as this one could quickly affect scheduling for later flights, according to AirTran spokesman Christopher White.

"We have reserve crews ready to jump in at a moments notice," White said late Saturday.

Friday afternoon, AirTran responded to Petruna's allegations in a point-by-point response to his e-mail, posted on the airline's internal Web site and made available to the media.

"There are no reports of any passenger standing up in a threatening manner," according to the AirTran statement. "At no time was there any physical altercation between passengers."

Although AirTran previously had declined to release the flight manifest, that changed Friday evening. In addition to discounting Petruna's story, the airline responded to the amount of attention it believed the circulated e-mail was gaining, White said.

There was no way Petruna could have seen what he described on Flight 297, AirTran said in a statement. Petruna departed from Akron-Canton, Ohio, on AirTran Flight 205 on Nov. 17, officials said. He was supposed to connect to Flight 297 for Houston, but he missed his first flight out of Ohio. And therefore, he missed the connecting flight.

AirTran said Flight 297 first left its gate at 4:40 p.m., "a full 26 minutes before Flight 205 arrived at the gate in Atlanta, making this flight connection impossible."

[flatbutt]

If true , one way or another the muslims managed to disrupt American life.

[M.D. Holloway]

if true, boy do you have to be careful about what you say (write) to who...

[speeder]

So it's total BS. What a big surprise...

[speeder]

And you won't see it reported on the news...

[gprsh924]

Am I the only one who at first thought this email was forwarded by Gene Hackman?

[sammyg2]

So far it sounds like a guy was making up an interesting (but false) story to tell a few friends and it got away from him.
He may have ......... issues.

[on2wheels52]

Perhaps someone's been watching a bit too much reality tv?
Jim

[M.D. Holloway]

I am never surprised by any foolishness anymore. I am just delighted that there are people like those on this bored and places like Snopes to keep us all thinking!

[David]

I don't need Snopes. I was interviewed for and offered an engineering job on the zero bouncy tank several years ago. I can assure you that anyone in that position would do more than get on the plane and just write an email.

[onewhippedpuppy]

Jack_Bauer@gmail.com

[willtel]

Just noticed this on an Atlanta news site.
Flight 297 Passenger: Incident Bigger Than AirTran Claims - News Story - WSB Atlanta

Originally Posted by WSBTV.com

Rumors continued to circulate Monday via e-mail and the Internet about what exactly happened on an AirTran flight at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in November.

At the time, AirTran told Channel 2 Action News that an unruly passenger on a cell phone forced the pilot to take the plane back to the gate. Monday, a passenger said the situation went well beyond that.

“It was extremely intense. I’ve never experienced anything like that,” said passenger Brent Brown.

Brown runs a security consultant company and is a frequent flier. But even for him, he said the events of Flight 297 were disturbing and frightening. As the Houston-bound flight taxied to the runway, several in a group of about a dozen men of Middle Eastern descent started walking the aisles and using their cell phones, Brown said.

Brown said he could tell from the flight attendants' actions that the situation was more than just a single passenger misbehaving.

"This was a big step ahead of that. You could tell that they were distressed and that they were getting very much uncooperative people in the back," said Brown. "So when the pilot turned the plane around, not only was I not surprised I was proud that he had made that effort to secure the cabin."

Back at the gate, Brown said the situation did not improve. He said he was sitting toward the front and he never saw law enforcement enter the plane. He also said that no one informed passengers of what was going on.

"They weren't speaking to us. And they didn't speak to us at all for at least an hour. Our only interaction was with the crew that was already upset at the way they were obviously being handled," said Brown.

Within days, the incident went viral on the Internet which prompted news coverage. Internet rumor control sites seemingly couldn’t make heads or tails of the incident. AirTran responded by posting an article that called most of the claims an "urban myth."

"And then after the fact, when (AirTran) apparently issued a statement that says, in effect, that this was a customer service issue or someone was on the phone...they're dead wrong," said Brown.

The crew, including the pilots, decided not to continue with the flight. Brown said AirTran put about 10 of the 12-man group back on the plane with a new crew. Most of the original passengers chose not to re-board and instead got on a different flight.

Because of privacy laws, the airline would not identify any of the men involved in the November incident.

An AirTran spokesman called the incident "isolated" and said the airline considers the case closed.

[pwd72s]

The only comment I got back from my retired pilot buddy wasn't very enlightening. I quote:

"I got the same info last week."

This in reference to Mike's original post.

[Geronimo '74]

Originally Posted by gprsh924

Am I the only one who at first thought this email was forwarded by Gene Hackman?

No, you are not.

[daepp]

Originally Posted by 125shifter

zero bouncy tank

???

[David]

Originally Posted by DAEpperson

???

Spelling's not my strong suit