In 1995, my future in-laws and I went to Paramount’s King’s Dominion amusement park in Virginia. While we were there, a gang fight broke out where someone was critically injured in a knife fight.
The next year we went again. They now had metal detectors at the entrance. They stopped my father-in-law and made him take a 2" pocket knife back to his vehicle.
So an amusement park can protect people against untoward uses of a knife, but airport security can’t?
Years ago, my then-brother-in-law (an airline pilot) told me that airport security is a joke; that it was staffed by many otherwise unemployable people. I believe this more and more every year.
A first-hand account: My hometown of Grand Jct., CO has a small 4-gate airport. It used to be a lot busier in the past during the uranium and oil shale booms in western Colorado. But now it just has 2-3 flights to and from Denver or Salt Lake per day. With this low volume, someone has decided that the security gates should go unstaffed.
The last time I flew out of GJ, I simply walked out on the tarmac and onto my plane. When we got to Denver, we walked through a detector in order to get into the terminal building. Anyone could’ve easily smuggled any kind of weapon onto that flight.
I was frustrated many times by being turned back at the security checkpoint for having a kubaton on my keychain - grumblegrumbletrudgebacktothecarleaveitwalkalltheway
backgrumblegrumble
So I was shocked/amused the time that I sent my coat through the x-ray machine, picked it up, went merrily on my way and suddenly realized that I still had my 4" punch-dagger (you could not mistake this for anything OTHER than a knife) clipped to the inside of the lapel.
It the Kansas City airport, they didn’t X-ray our carry on luggage, just herded us, luggage and all, through a metal detector. Despite the 3 oz. Swiss Army knife in my bag and the full ring of keys in my pocket, the metal detector didn’t go off, though a security guy stood watchfully beside it.
I’m sure that very few terrorists ply their nefarious trade on flights from Kansas City, MO to Cedar Rapids, IA, but it was still a bit troubling.
Maybe we shouldn’t turn this into a list of, “Hey, these airports have the weakest security!” responses. Stories are fine, but change the names to protect the innocent, okay?
I have had both a standard waiter-style wine key (that’s a corkscrew) and a large (5") safety pin confiscated from me because they could possibly be used as weapons; they were held by the flight crew and returned to me after landing. I can’t remember for sure but these were probably on international flights. It’s shocking that a safety pin gets taken away but carpet knives are apparently A-okay.
Well I was travelling to Germany three weeks ago and went through JFK (which , I’m sure, is now tighter than a virgin’s asshole). I had just washed my hair, so I had left it loose to dry. Now, even in New York my hair is kind of a sight - knee length and an intense, dark purple. All four women working security came over and started cooing over it.
The woman at the scanning machine starts trying to get the supervisor’s attention. The supervisors, her hands literally in my hair (I hate that!), turns around and says “Now, then, you KNOW she doesn’t have anything really dangerous in that bag. You just let it through”
So what was in the bag? My favorite purse (I don’t carry it on me while traveling, for obvious reasons) which is a seven-inch hollow metal sphere, with approximately three dozen 1-2 inch spikes coming out of it, and a chain carry handle. Aside from the fact that this resembles nothing more than a mace, and could easily be used as such, the entire thing is completely X-ray opaque, so I could have been hiding anything in there. I had fully expected it to be searched, and so left it easily available (i.e. I could have gotten to it anytime during the flight). And this was JFK.
Of course, we must consider that stricter security measures would not necessarily have prevented these events. Even if all passengers were required to board the planes bare-ass naked after a thorough cavity search, these villains would have overpowered the crews with their bare hands. They were determined. They would have found a way around any measures put in place.
If guns had been allowed on flights, they would have had guns. If switchblades had been allowed, they would have had switchblades. If carrot peelers were allowed, they’d have had those.
As it stood, non-locking knives with 4-inch blades were allowed. So they worked within that constraint. Was security too lax? Not necessarily. Were the rules too lax? Quite possibly.
Geez. Call me naive but I had no idea knives were even allowed, ever. I’ve been flying all this time under the assumption that anything that could be used as a weapon was not allowed. Not a little bitty pocket knife, not a screwdriver, nothin’. Now I’ve heard they let people on with tool boxes all the time, and apparently standards differ from airport to airport.
Somebody tell jarbaby that that now, at least I’m scared shitless of flying if nothing else.
Not naive, Sunshine, but perhaps unaware. I’ve worn my Leatherman tool daily for several years, and I take it on flights with me. It has two blades and a bone saw, all of which are more dangerous weapons IMO than a boxcutter. And I’m all too happy to stop wearing it now.
Quite frankly, I’m none too happy to stop carrying mine. Terrorists very well might be able to sneak a weapon through airport security, but I’ll be damned if I am going to try. Now I feel even more defenseless. A friend of mine suggested a roll of quarters or a bag of sand to use as fist weapons. Me, I prefer a few inches of steel.
Yes, ironically, knives with 3" blades (actually acceptable length varied by airline, airport, who was working that day, etc) were acceptable but kubaton’s were not. For those who don’t know, a kubaton is a 6" (15 cm) stick (wood or metal) that often looks like nothing more than a wooden key chain handle. As someone who knows how to use one, I can say they are effective weapons, but I don’t know that I’d prefer one over a knife with a 3" blade.
I used to get jumpy carrying my 2" non-locking pocket knife through airports till I realized nobody flinched. Recently I took to wearing a 3" locking knife. It’s one of the types with a full sized handle, one-handed opening stud on the blade. Now I wouldn’t even carry the small one on travel.
I once got stopped at security in an airport cause I kept beeping at the gate, and couldn’t figure out why. I was on business travel, and had spent the day in a machine shop studying equipment. It finally dawned on me I was still wearing my steel-toe boots. I had flown out in tennies with the boots in my suitcase, and somehow I didn’t think of it till I got the wand waved over me.
You can kill someone relatively easily with a knife. If I tried to hijack a plane brandishing a roll of quarters, people would probably think that I just couldn’t find the Pez dispenser.
I’ve flown out of MCI (Kansas City) more than 300 times over the last few years, and I’ve never seen this happen, ever. It must have been some sort of extraordinary occurance, where the x-ray was broken and they had no spare. Overall, I would rate the security procedure at MCI to be higher than normal, based on all the airports I go through each year.
About 15 years ago I had to go through a metal detector to get to a presentation. It went off, and I realized I had forgotten to leave my pocket knife at home–it was a four-inch lockblade. The officer told me I couldn’t take it in, which I figured, but when I asked him to hold it for me he consulted somebody else and decided I could take it in after all. So I did…and I ended up close enough to the VIP that I could have killed him with that knife, though of course I didn’t.
Oh, the VIP was then-Vice President of the United States George Bush.