I don’t see why not. Not too long ago, I saw a snippet of an interview on CNN with an Iraqi woman who had sandy-brown hair and light skin. She wouldn’t have looked out of place at a PTA meeting in Mayberry. Similarly, I’ve seen pictures of Muslim guys who look “white.” There’s a diverse ethic heritage in the Middle East.
It just seems like to me as soon as the profiling started the terrorists would simply adapt their plans and begin using light-skinned people.
Looks like William Hurt better get busy and start writing travel guides for the twenty-first century.
Yeah, good luck to them with that. You have to play the odds here. It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t fair, but it is a solution that will work, with tweaks to adjust the profiles as new data comes in. Besides, what need it there to subject a mother of three from Omaha to all this? Deal with the likely nutballs, and let the rest of the people get back to work.
I suspect they’re already profiling heavily. Grandma Shapiro is being patted down just for show. The authorities don’t want it to be obvious that they are profiling so that the ACLU doesn’t come down on their backs.
Perhaps there’s no official memo at the airport that says “pay careful attention for young middle eastern men,” but you can’t tell me that’s not the unwritten policy.
And FWIW I took a lot of buses back in the 80s and there was no security whatsoever. You could bring whatever weapons you wanted with you.
women are going to get just a little upset at having to show their tampons.
And who is going to risk giving up his keys to the goddess of lost-luggage?
How long can this last? LOTS of people will just stop flying.
I’d prefer to drive 12 hours rather than fly under these conditions. And a businessman who has an important PowerPoint presentation to give , but loses it because he was forced to check his laptop with his luggage that got sent to the wrong city, will certainly sue the airline.
Private citizens may not be able to change things, but when people stop flying, and corporate lawyers start suing, the airline companies will have a lot of lobbyists telling TSA to back down.
According to news reports here in the UK, at least one of the people arrested was an employee at Heathrow.
The obvious fear is that even items for sale in the departure areas (ie. after screening) could be swapped by a co-conspiritor and handed to a bomber after he’d been checked.
“Pint of the special whisky, please Abdul”
In June the Eclipse was listed as costing $1.52 million with an operating cost of $340/hour. The next cheapest jet goes for $4.5 million and costs twice as much to operate.
The more I fly commercially, the more I want my own airplane. I generally get to the airport about two hours early if I’m flying out of LAX. (SNA isn’t so bad.) It takes two and a half hours or so to fly to Seattle. There can be an hour layover in Seattle, and then another 45 minutes to BLI. A flight from SoCal to Bellingham usually takes a total (including security checkpoints) six to eight hours.
Dad and I used to fly his Cessna 172 from Lancaster, CA to Medford, OR. It would take about seven hours, including a fuel/meal stop in Red Bluff for about an hour. (The 182 was faster and had long range tanks, but we’d still stop in Red Bluff for a bite to eat.) No security checkpoints. (That was a while ago, but still…) So it takes about 15 minutes to preflight the aircraft. Figure about 115 miles per hour in a 172 inculding the fuel/food stop. That would mean about 11 or 12 hours to fly a Skyhawk from L.A. to Bellingham, including another fuel stop.
That’s a long day. On the other hand, I’ve frequently driven 19-20 hours in a day. Personal flying can be more fatiguing than driving (dehydration due to altitude, not as much room to move around – Cessna seats can get a little uncomfortable around hour six, flying is more mentally challenging than driving), but you also don’t have to watch speed limits and traffic isn’t that much of an issue (it’s a Big Sky 
). So it can be done.
You can carry your box cutter if you want to. Or a hunting knife or a disposable lighter. Or whatever. You don’t have to take your shoes off. You don’t have to worry about missing a connecting flight. You can take as much baggage as you like (within the weight limits of your aircraft). You make your own schedule, rather than having to be at a certain place at a certain time. The view is much better. And you’re flying yourself! 
Avgas is – what? $4/gallon? If you burn 9 gal/hr that’s about 100 gallons over an 11-12 hour flight. So with a meal or two that’s about $500 each way, $1,000 r/t. When I went home in July it cost (IIRC) about $565 r/t. So flying a Skyhawk would cost twice as much as flying commercially and take twice as long, and you’ll be pretty tired at the end of the flight. But if you fly with a passenger the per-seat cost comes in line with flying commercially. (A Skyhawk will seat four, but you will have to make more fuel stops if you can’t get everyone and their bags in it and keep it under gross weight with full tanks, and a heavier aircraft will burn more fuel.)
I’m not counting the cost of the aircraft (a mid-'70s Skyhawk costs around $50,000) or other costs (cost per hour to fly does require taking into account the cost of maintenance – e.g., overhaul every 2,000 flying hours, annual and possibly 100-hour inspections, etc., insurance, tie-down, and so on), or training. Still, the cost of flying yourself and a passenger isn’t all that much more than flying commercially. the big factor is time. Is it worth the extra time – twice as long on a long trip – to avoid the hassles of the modern commercial airport? I’m beginning to think so. If you’re making a shorter trip (say 400 to 500 miles) it may actually be faster to fly yourself than to take a scheduled airline, as has been shown numerous times in ‘races’ conducted by various flying magazines. (Of course, they would say that!) One big advantage of personal flying is that you don’t have to fly to or from a major airport. You can get much closer to your destination. For example, I could fly directly to Bellingham (or to Blaine, for that matter) without having to change planes in Seattle. And my baggage will stay with me. The other big factor is weather. If weather is poor you’ll need to be rated to fly in it, your aircraft will need to be equipped for it, and you’ll be flying in weather that airlines fly over.
Still, even with the longer flying times (on a longer trip), the expense of aircraft ownership, the initial and recurring training, and the higher probability of weather delays, personal flying is becoming ever more attractive to me. And I’m talking about a Skyhawk. A Quickie Q200 or a Rutan Long EZ will approach 200 mph and burn less fuel. (Though at the expense of baggage capacity, and the fact that you’re flying an amateur-built aircraft.) Personal flying will never be ‘cheap’, but if people catch on then demand may cause aircraft manufacturers to make more airplanes resulting in more used aircraft on the market, which may make them a little more affordable.
But what about the Eclipse? Six seats, right? Five for passengers? Good for corporations, I think. I can’t see them being used for flights from L.A. to Bellingham because A) How many people will want to go to Bellingham? B) Such an operation would probably require security measures similar to those used by major airlines; and C) I’m not convinced that ticket prices would be cheaper than regular airlines. The biggest factor for charter/air taxi would be the ability to get closer to where you want to be.
Are they prohibiting books and magazines? I don’t see them on the proscribed list, but I don’t see them onm the allowed list, either. I can see someone saying that they can be hollowed out and used to smuggle in things, but surely you can check them by just flipping them open.
If I have to fly without reading material, I’ walking.
Wrong: the shoe bomber Richard Reid; one of the latest arrests in the UK; and at a stretch John Walker Lindh (though he hasn’t been implicated in blowing up planes).
Unless the government immunizes the airline.
No, not when the lawyers start suing: when a couple of shaky old carriers go belly-up and even Southwest starts having to downsize.
The Government may try to fire back with the silenus answer as a condition of relenting. Thing is, it does not need to be raw ethno-racial profiling (which could be counterproductively provocative): with well-organized intelligence/law enforcement criteria and the necessary technology you may be able to design proper targeted-profiling/watchlist protocols. But there hasn’t been the will to do that, partly due to concerns about possible abuse, but also partly because by definition that would be an “invisible” program that you can’t parade in front of the customers/voters to say “look, we’re doing something great!”
Of course, another thing this does is confirm to the bad guys that our biggest fear is Terrorists on a Plane. I haven’t noticed really any new, extra-stringent security measures being implanted on rail systems in the USA after the Madrid and London bombings. Have you?
So when to does the right-wing cause a shitstorm when TSA orders some old woman to through away her Bible?
Except that box cutters aren’t a threat anymore, either. That particular plan worked exactly once, and never will again. Someone with a blade weapon might kill a few people, even a few dozen if he were particularly adept, but now that we know the risks, the people would swarm against such things.
Have you ever asked? I just ask for a can of club soda and another can of juice. If you’re thirstly later, just hit the call button and ask for two bottles of water. I’ve never had them refuse any reasonable beverage request I made.
The thing that gets me about the current restrictions is that they’re not treating the liquid like a hazardous material. Either it is, or it isn’t.
I agree with others that I will be less likely to fly if they continue to place restrictions on it. Not only because it’s stuipd and a hassle, but because further security restrictions make the wait longer, which means you have to get to the aiport earlier, which reduces the value of the flight compared to driving.
The UK lis listing the ONLY things you can carry on. See my cite above. In the US, YMMV depending on whether the flight is going to the UK.
Update: Seems like the already thought of it.
According to this article:
The list included guys name Oliver and Brian.
Profiling wouldn’t have caught them unless “nice, ordinary” people are included in the searches.
One thing at a time. Shoes, we check them. Terrorists know that and wont use them. Box cutters not allowed ,who would try.?We check too late and dont match their imagination.
How did the airlines get away free in 911. They used the cheapest untrained help they could find. They had poor quality under conditioned xray machines. They took passenger checking as a threat to profits not a duty. They were rewarded with a few billion to compensate for their losses. Which I heard they spent on corporate jets for high profit passengers.
IMHO, the problem is intractable. And ironic. Every day, millions of people climb into cars, even though they know there’s a non-zero risk they will die in an accident. Last I checked, US auto fatalities run about 38,000 per year. A low risk, but very definitely non-zero. Meanwhile, we as a society expect air travel to be ZERO risk. A single plane blown up by terrorists would be considered an abject failure of the system. Followed by lots of finger pointing at those who let us down. Given that, the system protects itself by implementing more and more security measures, both to reduce risk and to assure the public they’re being protected. Some of us grumble that the measures have gone too far, but most subscribe to the anything-that-makes-us-safer-is-okay mentality. If anything, they’re more worried about the holes in the system than whether it’s trying too hard. So long as that’s the model - and I don’t thinks it’s going to change - we’re going to be stuck with increasingly intrusive and draconian security measures trying to ferret out every possible risk.
What frustrates me most is that, in a real sense, the terrorists have achieved their objective. They have made us afraid. We as a society have given up billions and billions of dollars in productivity since 9/11 (is anyone aware of a plausible estimate of just how big is that bogie?) because we’re scared s***less that three hundred of us might die in a plane explosion. Personally, I would prefer that we approach the problem from the other end. Define a level of security measures we find acceptable - say, an hour processing time per passenger, including time in line - do what we can with that expenditure and accept the non-zero risk those measures will occasionally fail. As I said, though, I don’t see this approach ever being adopted.
There are different types of risk.
If you do not make a serious effort to screen passengers, and an even more important, be seen to make the effort, then you increase the ‘risk’ exponentially.
The problem in the UK is not the screening, it is because the UK airport authorities are not set up for the screening. It is not a ‘system failure’ - the system just is not there.
How are they going to find such individuals, if they do not belong to a profile? Wait until something goes boom?
Wouldn’t forcing people to sit in an airline seat for up to 25 hours with no reading material be considered cruel and unusual punishment?
Honestly, how the hell can they consider books and magazines a threat? Flip them open or run them through the X-Ray machine if you must…
I do hope it all settles down sometime soon, or I’m going to have to seriously re-evaluate my holiday plans for the next year or two…