I’m heading from St. Louis to Denver tomorrow on frontier airlines. I noticed that I could print out an e-boarding pass and save myself some time at check in. Great! I thought… Then, upon entering my flight info on Frontier’s site to print a copy I received the message “Your reservation requires special handling.”
As if airports weren’t a headache enough! Now, I can’t even save time. There is nothing out of the ordinary about my ticket… It’s a standard airline ticket… What could possibly cause it to require special handling? What does this mean? Longer waiting in lines at the airport? :smack:
Congratulations, you are a selectee. There are many reasons you may have been selected, or it really could be “random”…which is what the airline will probably tell you if you ask. There is nothing you can do about it and you will want to get to the airport earlier. I used to travel non-rev alot…which meant flying standby and everytime I was subjected to the “additional security measures” which, at the time anyway, meant they’d paw though my belongings not only at the security checkpoint, but also at the gate…it was awesome. I haven’t been a selectee in probably three years or so, so not sure if procedures have changed.
So… it turns out I wasn’t selected for special screening… However, you dopers did freak me out so I made extra sure that I didn’t break any rules or accidently carry on a restricted item. Well, that didn’t save me from the most embarassing moment ever:
I get my boarding pass and move towards the gate in the airport and approach the security checkpoint. I took all my keys and change out of my pocket and I had nothing but paper money in pockets. No problem, right? wrong.
After walking through the first time, the “Beeeep” went off and I did a wtf?! I was told to take off my shoes and send them through the XRay machine… I knew it wasn’t them setting off the detector because they had no laces! (Slip on steve maddens)
So, in socks, I walk through again to hear another “Beeeeep” at which time the security woman asks if I have a belt on. I did and turned around to take off my belt and send it through the xray machine as well while noticing a line of about 8-10 people now waiting for me to go through. As I lift my shirt slightly to remove my belt, I realized my fly was WIDE OPEN. Everyone’s attention was directed ‘downstairs’ as I motioned to remove the belt… Needless to say, they got a flash of the ‘goods’ as I didn’t have boxers with a buttonfly on today.
It’s not the laces, some shoes have a metal strip in the sole.
My procedure when going through airport security is to take my shoes off, take my belt off, empty all pockets of everything, take my laptop out of its bag. Then the laptop goes into a plastic box, my pocket junk and belt goes into another box, and the shoes and laptop bag go through the scanner on their own. Taking the shoes and belt off every time as I’m waiting in line is much more efficient than getting stopped by a sensitive scanner every 2nd or 3rd time through an airport.
I can’t believe you have to go through such intrusive procedures every time you fly! We don’t do that sort of thing over here… 'course I don’t live in the land of the free.
I don’t know where over here is, but you do recall we had a problem with 4 airliners about 5 years back? :rolleyes:
I have been throught airports in England, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands since 9/11 and their security has been on par with what I go through in the US.
Out of curiosity, were you you flying to the US, or through a terminal where US-bound flights leave from? In that instance you may get caught up in the US-mandated shoes-off nonsense. For instance in Frankfurt the flights to LHR leave from the same part of the terminal as the US flights, which means going though European-level security (laptop out of bag, x-ray, metal detector, the lot) and then going through the whole rigmarole AGAIN, with occasional bonus shoe-removing action half-way down the terminal to get to the ‘extra-secure’ gates.
In general the european security procedures aren’t any different from what they were before 9/11. Lufthansa have even brought back metal cutlery on-board.
Although BAA did fail a security audit a while ago and had to introduce laptop-scanned-separately, with the result that every airport in the UK developed queues back into the ticket hall :smack:
The shoe screening may sound silly at first, but perhaps you may recall an individual a while back who attempted to blow up an airplane with explosives that were concealed in his shoes? Who was restrained by the crew and passengers? No, I don’t mind taking my shoes off at the airport. I’m not all that fond of shoes anyway.
Just for the record, we don’t have to take our shoes off, but if we go through the metal detector and we beep, then shoes and belt are the likely culprits. So they come off and are scanned. Rather than have to walk through the screener numerous times, I prefer to get everything that may beep off to start with.
Here’s a silly security scenario I went through recently. There’s a bit of back story that I don’t have time to go in to now, but the end result is just as ridiculous. I was on a flight that had no check in service and had to put all of my luggage through security. I told them that there was a pair of nail clippers in there. They opened the bag, retrieved the nail clippers, and gave them to the airport manager who escorted me to the tarmac. She then gave the clippers back to me!
It appears that nail clippers are allowed “airside” but not in the sterile part of the terminal. Thing is, the nail clippers still went in to the sterile area, they were just in the manager’s possession rather than mine. She even said herself that it was stupid of them (security.)
To make it even more of a joke, the security at this particular airport, only exists for commercial flights, if I had been there half an hour earlier or later I could have used my own gate pass to get through to the tarmac without having to even talk to someone. It makes me wonder just what they think they are achieving.[/unanticipated rant]
yeah, right. Because explosives inside a pair of brogues are so high on the list of convenient and successful ways of bringing down an airliner. In fact, so handy a method that it has never brought down a plane, despite pretty much every single passenger in the history of commercial aviation wearing shoes. X-raying shoes is a classic example of illusory safety at the expense of vast inconvenience.
That’s about what I do too. Also, since I carry a camera around, I remove all the film from the case (and I try to never travel with film in my camera, in case they want to open it up and check to see that there’s nothing non-photography related inside the film compartment) and politely insist on having it hand-checked rather than run through an X-Ray. This is also where showing up early comes in handy, so the security guard won’t have a long line of other people behind you to make him inclined not to honor your request for not just running the film through the X-Ray.
The policy in the US is that they can’t force you to have your shoes X-Rayed, but that they can recommend you do it to save time. If your shoes trigger an alarm, you will be hand wanded. If they “recommend” you to put your shoes through the X-Ray machine and you do not, you will be wanded whether they trigger an alarm or not. I’ve been through hundreds of metal detectors with my shoes and they never trigger an alarm, but the TSA agents will often recommend I have them X-Rayed. The exchange usually runs like this.
TSA agent - “I recommend you place your shoes on the belt.”
Me- “Do I have to? I’ve been through lots of these and these shoes never trigger the alarm.”
TSA agent - “It will save time.”
Me - “That’s all right, I’ve got time.”
This is only if I actually have time, because you will be hand wanded, and they are very thorough, just to let you know you should have taken their recommendation.
Sometimes I wonder if this makes me an asshole, but to be honest, there are so many other things that make me an asshole, that I don’t have time to worry about this one.
I think that may be an exaggeration. X-ray/metal-detector checks do make a significant difference in terms of safety, it’s just the marginal faffing around as regards things like shoes etc. that are not cost-effective.
Similarly I believe the german security folks used to insist you booted up any laptop you were taking on the plane to check it wasn’t a bomb. That must have been horrifically time-consuming, and also fairly pointless, since it’s not that hard to fit a few hundred grams of semtex into a laptop and still have it work well enough to pass that check. Hence they got rid of it.
To get back to the OP, a colleague of mine was Sri Lankan by birth and travelled very extensively both within the US and abroad. At one point she had been ‘randomly selected’ for over a dozen consecutive flights. Obviously the TSA have some sort of terrorist profile that fits an Arizona-resident female Sri Lankan with a New Zealand passport racking up millions of miles on behalf of a US multinational. She was getting kinda chafed, as you can imagine.
