Big deal. That’s making you sound like the guy who is chasing the young 'uns off your lawn. I recall when I could sit at home at night and choose from three reasonably decent television programs at 8 pm, rather than having to slog through hundreds of really poor television choices, only to decide that re-watching a movie will probably be more fun, if only I can remember which of my streaming services is showing it. And if you are finding it annoying to stand in line for endless hours, may I suggest that you simply pony up for TSA Pre-check, which is ridiculously quick in most airports.
The main issue here is whether or not TSA screening has any significant value in reducing/removing the threat of air terror (of ANY kind, not just hijackings; after all, a bomb in an airplane is not a hijacking). It is possible that the hyped-up screening is preventing such attacks; it is also possible that it is not preventing anything, either because no one is trying anything, nor would they try anything, or because other methods are weeding them out first. But given the laundry list of confiscated items that could do real damage if in the wrong hands, I’m comfortable with continuation of the screening pretty much as-is, and that’s despite the fact that I tend to agree that it’s more for “show” than for actual “effect”.
Those deprecating the TSA ignore the many bottles of human breast milk for babies which have been turned away. Milk can be mixed with cyanide, ricin and other deadly poisons.
Wow! This may tell us little about TSA or terrorism, but it sure reminds us about American Exceptionalism — what makes the Land of the Brave so special.
First, I was responding to the suggestion that allowing friends to go to the gate with you would make the long lines even longer.
Second, as I said, if these procedures are keeping X number of people from being killed each year, then it may very well be worth it. I’m just curious what the new advanced screening would capture that the previous system didn’t catch.
I mean, if I run my bag through an X ray device and I go through a metal detector, that should catch any guns, knives, or bombs.
Wait, pouring human breast milk down the drain is a good thing now? What the hell would a terrorist do with ricin-laced human breast milk? Force people to drink it?
There were lots of Cuban hijackings around 1974. Notice that there weren’t that many US hijackings after the metal detectors got put in, and many of them were things like fake bombs. One was an airline employee who did not get screened IIRC.
Things were pretty loose before then. In 1970 I smuggled a hamster onto the plane in my camera case. Today I could call it a support hamster.
Sorry for my IMHO statement, but the terrorists it stops are those who decided not to even try. And it is utterly impossible to know how many of those there have been. One thing for sure. After the old flight inspections started, people stopped hijacking flights to Cuba. And even those fairly crude inspections should not have allowed 19 people with boxcutters on four different flights.
News Flash. Flying stopped being fun sometime in the 1970’s, well before 9/11. It happened at about the time air travel became affordable for the average person on a regular basis and planes turned into Greyhound buses with wings, only way smaller and way less comfortable.
And most of the airports I am familiar with started restricting access to the gate area to passengers only at around that time, again well before 9/11. In some of them it was a congestion issue more than security — as more people started flying everywhere there were more flights and more people crowded into the same space. On my last flight out of LaGuardia the congestion was nightmarish, the passengers that were boarding were spilling out of the boarding area into the way too narrow central aisle, making it difficult for arriving passengers to navigate their way out of the gate area.
In terms of your daughters life experiences, I can promise both of you that the experience of having a beer or coffee with a friend in the bar just outside of airport security is virtually identical to that of having a beverage at the bar in the gate area. So please don’t lose sleep thinking that her life will be bereft of enrichment because she has been denied this experience.
That reminds me of the story of the old mountain man who drank moonshine every morning and told his wife that it was his “medicine.” His wife remarks that she has never seen him sick and he replies that it just shows what good medicine it is.
You may be right, but at the cost of billions of dollars per year and untold freedoms, we should require something more than just that statement as that statement could be made about any utterly worthless program as well.
It would be like the city paying me $1 million per year to keep heroin off of my street. Then when the heroin level is low, medium, or even high on my street, I could argue that things would have been much, much worse without my skill.
Yeah, I wasn’t thinking so much that “flying should be fun”, more that "flying shouldn’t be miserable and dehumanizing.
Having a beer outside security is nothing like having a beer inside security, because you have the nagging worry of having to get through security, and not being certain you will be able to catch your plane. I once waited a very long time behind a woman with a “cheese knife”, who quite reasonably point out that it wasn’t sharp enough to cut flesh, but unreasonably thought that somehow the security guy would let something with “knife” in its name through security. Another time the TSA screener decided to spend 20 minutes examining my nail clipper. (Which was legal at the time, and he did eventually let it through, despite it having a file attached that, I dunno, might have scratched someone?)
It’s not a huge deal for a fully competent adult that you can’t bring friends with you to the gate, but it IS a huge deal for people like my daughter, who has an anxiety disorder and isn’t very good at dealing with the world. Getting her to college would have been a hell of a lot easier if we could have taken her to her gate, and not dropped her off outside security.
And every one of those confiscated knives represents a financial loss to the person who accidentally brought it with them. My mother has had TSA steal about 4 small pocketknives, because she always carries one and forgets she has it. So she’s had to buy new ones.
Just add up the time we all spend taking off our shoes and putting them on again. What’s the economic value of that?
I’d say it depends on what you’d call “air terror”. The TSA may not be very good at stopping terrorist plots, for the various reasons listed in this thread; I’d say what they’re best at is ensuring that when the drunken businessman in 32A finally loses his shit over the drunken tourist sitting in 32B who keeps hogging the damn armrest, their subsequent fistfight isn’t a knife fight.
Whether or not their efforts are worth the billions we spend on them, I cannot say. But it seems to me their principle value (as opposed to their stated mission) lies in hindering non-terroristic violence.
Is it true that the additional screening is causing more deaths due to increased ground travel (and auto accidents)? This security blogger claims so, but I don’t know enough about it to be certain.
Anecdotally, I’ve become so disillusioned with air travel that I take my own vehicle unless absolutely forced by job requirements and time. It seems likely a lot more are doing this.
Do they still make you do this in American airports? I don’t recall ever having had to do this in European airports, except in Moscow (and even then, not in the last five years).
It’s certainly possible. The rationale for allowing infants to be carried as unrestrained projectiles is that, if you make them travel in seats, more families will travel by car which is even less safe for the baby (never mind everyone else).
But you’d have to tease out how much of the increased lines etc. are due to the increased screenings as opposed to ~15 million additional passengers each year squeezing into airports that are mostly the same size as they were in 2001.
Global air travel is increasing at 6% per year, compared to global population growth, which is 1.07% and decreasing. More people are travelling and fewer people are dying in planes. Someone is doing something right.
