Man with suspicious package at airport ‘not a terrorist,' adviser says

By Ty Tagami and Mike Morris

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The passenger behind Monday’s bomb scare at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport thinks police did the right thing in arresting him even though he was not toting a bomb.

Don Oberlander, 57, was carrying signal flares packed in a metal tube, said his financial adviser, whom he called from jail.

"I know exactly why they kept me there for eight hours" in an interrogation, Oberlander told his adviser, Allison McCurry of Lilburn, who related her conservation with him to the AJC Tuesday.

"He's not a terrorist," she said. "He's a stand-up guy."

Oberlander, of Cumming, called McCurry from the Clayton County Jail, where he was being held on a misdemeanor charge of reckless conduct.

He is a retired Eastern Air Lines pilot and was flying on an airline to Houston to pick up a small aircraft that was being serviced, McCurry said. He wanted to have the flares in case anything went wrong during his return flight, she said.

"He said, ‘I made a mistake. I don't know what I was thinking,'" McCurry said. "I think he thought he didn't have time to buy those signal flares when he got there."

Atlanta police confirmed Tuesday afternoon what McCurry said about the flares in Oberlander's luggage. But airport spokesman John Kennedy, speaking for police, said the emergency flares were contained in a galvanized steel pipe. McCurry had said the pipe was made of aluminum.

The pipe was found in Oberlander's luggage by U.S. Transportation Security Administration screeners around 6 a.m. Monday after he arrived at the North Terminal curbside check-in, Atlanta police said. The package was removed from the scene by an Atlanta bomb squad.

It's a violation of federal regulations to bring flares onto an airliner, TSA spokesman Jon Allen said. He said the TSA lacks arrest authority and turns over passengers with weapons to local law enforcement officials who decide whether charges are warranted.

Oberlander could not be reached for comment. McCurry found a criminal lawyer to represent him in a first appearance hearing before a Clayton County magistrate Tuesday afternoon. Oberlander's bond was set at $3,500, but he remained in jail Tuesday evening.