Up now in Patrick Smith's ASK THE PILOT column on Salon.com...
THE WRONG THINGS. TEN YEARS ON, AIRPORT SECURITY STILL NOT GETTING IT RIGHT
An excerpt...
"....At the Bangkok airport they took my scissors. They were safety scissors, the kind you'd give to a child, about two-and-a-half inches long with rounded tips. Highly dangerous -- at least as the BKK security staff saw it....
...It's funny, but not really, when you stop consider how easy it would be to fashion a sharp object -- certainly one deadlier than pair of rounded-end scissors -- * after * boarding an airplane, from almost anything within your reach: a wine bottle, a first-class juice glass, a piece of plastic moulding, and so on and so forth. But more to the point, pun intended, why do we still * care * so much about pointy objects?...
...When it came right down to it, success of the September 11th attacks had nothing -- nothing -- to do with boxcutters. The hijackers could have used anything. They were not exploiting a weakness in luggage screening, but rather a weakness in our mindset -- our understanding and expectations of what a hijacking was and how it would unfold. The hijackers weren't relying on weapons, they were relying on the element of surprise....
...All of that is different now. For several reasons, from passenger awareness to armored cockpit doors, the inflight takeover scheme has long been off the table as a viable M.O. for an attack. It was off the table before the first of the Twin Towers had crumbled to the ground. Why don't we see this? Here it is a * decade * later and we're still pawing through people's bags in a hunt for what are effectively harmless items...
...And there in Bangkok it hit me, in a moment of gloomy clarity: these rules are * never * going to change, are they? How depressing is that -- to be stuck with this nonsense permanently? Not only the obsession with sharps, but the liquids and gels confiscations, the shoe removals, etc. These policies aren't just annoying, they're potentially self-destructive. Self-destructive because they draw our security resources away from more useful pursuits...."
For the full article, visit
www.askthepilot.com.
The BLOG button will take you to the story. Entry is always free.