Snake on a Plane

Davis called Sergeant Palombo as soon as he hung up with Raul. Palombo says he tried to use his powers of persuasion on Raul three times over the next several minutes.

Palombo was worried about Grewal's exit-row window seat, though each of the aviation experts contacted by New Times said that wouldn't have been a safety issue in itself because cabin pressurization makes opening an emergency door during flight virtually impossible.

The sergeant also had contacted ACTIC for assistance.

Formed after the September 11 attacks and based in north Phoenix, the multiagency task force includes FBI personnel and is designed to be a one-stop shop for police in circumstances involving terror suspects and criminals.

"According to our protocol, ACTIC is our liaison with the FBI and other agencies, and they responded to us immediately," Palombo says. "Within minutes, I learned from ACTIC that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were going to play ball with us, that they would take our guy into custody if the plane landed up there."

But another hitch soon arose.

The ACTIC liaison told Palombo he had spoken to someone at Continental, and that airline brass were wondering who was going to pay for refueling Flight 82 if the pilot dumped thousands of gallons of fuel to ensure a safe landing.

"I was, 'You've got to be kidding me,'" the sergeant says. "He said he wasn't . . . I estimated that it might be 10 or 15 grand, something like that."

Palombo told the liaison he couldn't authorize that size of an expenditure, but, within minutes, he got the go-ahead from Assistant Police Chief Kevin Robinson.

"By now, the FBI, TSA and the FAA had become involved, and everyone was getting frustrated," Palombo says. "At this point, I'm in the mode of, `Just land the freaking plane! We promise to pay for it, okay?'"

All but one of the six aviation-safety experts contacted by New Times says Continental erred at this point.

Ross "Rusty" Aimer, chief executive officer of Aviation Experts, a San Clemente, California, consulting firm says, "If you have a fugitive killer on your airplane and law enforcement presents a direct case for landing that plane, then it's outrageous that you don't come back to Newark or land in one of the many other airports along the way. All I can think of is maybe the pilot was concerned that if he or she started turning back, the killer would go berserk and start killing people. But I really don't buy that."

Aimer retired from United Airlines in 2004 as an international 767 pilot and also flew for Continental during a distinguished 40-year career.

"The FBI had the authority to order a pilot to land [within U.S. airspace]," he says. "I'm surprised they didn't do that. I also don't understand why the FBI or another authority didn't pick up the phone and talk to that captain. They've done that with me, with a phone patch through air-traffic control — and even over the water."

But FBI Special Agent Deb McCarley claims her agency wasn't directly involved in the Grewal case until hours later, when Flight 82 was going to land in New Delhi.

"I have been advised that the FBI itself did not make any request of Continental Airlines to turn around that plane," spokeswoman McCarley says, adding that Phoenix police may have made their initial request through a U.S. Department of Justice field office "that wouldn't have had the authority to order the immediate landing of a trans-Atlantic flight."

Palombo responds drolly, "The FBI was involved. Actually, all of us [in law enforcement], including the FBI, were working on the same page, which was to get our suspect into police custody as soon as we could."

But Todd Curtis, the Seattle author of Understanding Aviation Safety Data and founder of the Web site AirSafe.com, says it wasn't a certainty that Flight 82 would return to Newark or divert to another airport just because police wanted it to.