Tales From the Ticket Counter – Just When You Thought It Was Safe
On September 11, 2001, about 20 men changed the rules. A little later in the day, several passengers changed them again. This holiday, sadly, another extremist tried to change them back. That passenger on Delta flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit tried to detonate an explosive when the aircraft was over the city of Detroit. From the reports I’ve read, he had the explosive liquids strapped to his legs somehow and was in the process of trying to mix them when at least one other passenger stopped him.
It’s been nearly 20 years since I’ve flown through the Amsterdam airport. When I was there last, I stayed in international concourse but went through security twice between my JFK and Frankfurt flights. Subsequent visits to the airport were similar. The place was amazingly secure and, still, this man was able to board his Delta flight with these dangerous substances on his person. I’m pretty astounded, I have to tell you.
We, as the traveling public, are partly responsible for weapons that end up on airplanes. Before you get too torqued up, I really wish that I could take you back to airport security checkpoints on September 10, 2001, where you would see the abuse people like you and me heaped upon the heads of the screeners, who were making barely over minimum wage and were subjected to consistent rude behavior. People joked about “the bomb in my bag.” People demanded that they be allowed to bring some banned item through with them. People demanded exceptions.
The rules were clear and, yet, I caught passengers several times in my career trying to board the aircraft with banned items. Once, man approached the aircraft with what appeared to be an artist’s box. When the man handed it to me gate check, I detected the strong, particular odor of turpentine. I asked the man about it and he said that, yes, he did have turpentine in the box. He was an artist and that box contained the tools of his trade and he would not allow them to go through the baggage system. He had adamantly insisted to the people in security that he must carry the box on the aircraft with him. And they let him. They allowed him to board the aircraft with all the makings of a Molotov cocktail because he had, basically, yelled loudly enough. To be honest, it never even occurred to him that his box was a bomb with pretty colors.
Another man approached the gate holding a driver. I asked how it was that he came to have that golf club inside security. He told me that it was a $200 driver and that there was no way he was putting it through the baggage system to be mangled. As politely as I could, I countered that there was no way he was boarding my aircraft with it. It was a weapon, had he never seen Parry Mason?
We, as the traveling public, too often had this mentality – the rules applied to everyone but us. We wanted to carry our stuff with us; so, we made scenes at security. After hundreds of these scenes a month, security screeners got worn down. Hey, they’re human. They got tired of the abuse; so, they stopped fighting back. They let us win and look what happened.
Total aircraft security means body scans, Tyveck suits, no carry-on or checked luggage. It means that we give up everything, trying to guarantee safety on air mass-transit. Can you imagine? Planes full of people who look like Oompa Loompas (minus the green hair and orange skin)? Can you see this working at all? I can’t.
As the stakes get higher and security necessarily a bigger hassle, what I can see is more people investigating air charter options. The TSA still defines allowable items; but, people know who they’re traveling with, both in terms of other passengers and even flight crews.
So, what do you want – greater security when you fly? What are you willing to put up with to get it -Tyvek suits or a little bigger price tag for a private option?
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We need Body Scan equipment because… as advanced as the magnetometer has become, it detects metals. The magnetometer is the walk through device that beeps when you walk through it with any metal on your person.
Your carry on items are x-rayed! The machine is now sophisticated to detect metals and their densities, food items can be identified from liquids and the training and testing is good of the agents completing the task.
However, if I walk through the metal detector with zero jewelry, I am already barefoot, I am wearing spandex leggings, which are in again so no one would be the wiser. I am wearing a cute sweater that passes my rump and I left my underwire bra at home.
I AM NOT GOING TO BEEP!
So, I am able to walk through the MAGNETOMETER with the plastic explosives or liquid explosives secured to my waist. WHY, because I did not beep!
The commercials and news reports I have seen for body scan show an image of a small gun strapped to the back of a woman. The magnetometer IS going to identify a hidden gun.
Now lets talk beeping…if I am randomly chosen for continued search, or if I do wear my underwire bra and it sets off the alarm on the magnetometer; I am pulled aside, asked to identify my carry on that has already been placed on the x-ray belt. I am asked, not told, that it will be necessary to identify the source of the beep. (keep in mind, I have already been escorted INTO the sterile area)
Now, a female agent first runs the hand wand over her watch to ensure the wand beeps and is properly working; she then runs it the proper distance over my entire body. She is only allowed to physically touch the area of my body sets off the hand wand. And to ensure she does not OFFEND me, she must touch the beeping source with the back of her hand to ensure it is not a weapon.
This entire security exercise is designed to keep the artists from bringing their tools of the trade on board the aircraft and the many other naive travelers who forgot to take the knives out of the carry ons, or the other ridiculous excuses that are heard on a daily basis.
I want to be body scanned! I do not care if a TSA agent anywhere in the world knows that I am lying about my weight!
We need to continue to screen the everyday naive passenger from causing an accident, but most importantly it we need to understand Terrorism uses death of innocent people to gain attention to their cause. And we need to remember the numbers: 246 people were killed in the airplanes that were used as weapons, 2,605 were killed in the Trade Centers, 40 people died on the United Airlines flight that crashed into Shanksville Pennsylvania and 125 persons died at our nations defense center, the Pentagon. The death toll did not end with the 2,976 persons that died on September 11th, it continues to rise with deaths associated with illnesses caused by the disaster.
Work to stop the NEXT TERRORIST ATTACT! Vote for body scanning! Campaign for Body Scanning! Write your Congressmen! Your Senators! Your President! ASK TO BE BODY SCANNED! Do your part in protecting yourself and me when we travel!
We were naïve, when we did not think our aircraft would be used as weapons against us. Lets NOT be naïve again to think terrorist are not seeing the same thing we see in our airports! Lets not die due to our vanity of someone seeing a computerized image of our imperfect or even perfect bodies.
Let us rejoice in the fact that if we are being screened at 100%, so is the terrorist. And when they think of a new method to murder us, lets fight against that one too, before they are able to use it!
In addtion to better equipment for scanning we need to figure out how to match all of these databases around the world. We have a disjointed system of intelligence that lets too many names fall through the cracks. There is no one simple fix. The solution must be comprehensive, adaptive, and always ahead of the terrorists who will continue to innovate their methods.
I have not yet decided where I land on the invasion of privacy debate. In reading your post, something else jumped off of the screen that I wanted to point out — in both of your stories, the passengers didn’t trust baggage handling to take care of their special care items. Perhaps this is part of the problem.
Youtube is rife with videos of baggage handlers tossing around luggage like garbage bags. These folks are also usually paid minimum wage for a physically demanding, exposed-to-the-elements, terrible-hours job. Maybe people would feel more inclined to check their precious cargo (be it paint thinners or golf clubs) if there was some kind of specialty service that not only marked items as fragile, but actually treated them as such. Or even something more basic such as a program that reduces the time it takes to get luggage from arrival to baggage claim. Most folks already feel like they spend too much time at the airport- the faster they can get to their destination, the better.
Without touching the topic of changing personal search technology, I wanted to note that there is probably room for improvement throughout the entire check-in/boarding system that will ease stress at the security checkpoints.