FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - The handicapped vs TSA debate
View Single Post
Old Dec 22, 2011 | 1:09 pm
  #56  
RichardKenner
 
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 1,972
Originally Posted by nachtnebel
Why would we be agreed on this? Clearly, if you have a 85-year old barely moving in a walker, or an emaciated man in a wheelchair, those are things that can be easily verified apart from the pax's statement. People like this represent much less of a risk and the protocols for them should reflect this.
I don't see that the wheelchair is a discriminant there. Consider a 30-year old man in a wheelchair vs an 85-year old not in a wheelchair. It would seem to me that risk-based screening should take into account the age of the passenger, but I don't see why it should take whether they arrive in a wheelchair or not into account. How could you determine at the checkpoint that a 30-year old man who present himself in a wheelchair actually needs one?

numbers please?
As was said upthread, there's no way to know, but clearly we're talking about once in a few orders of magnitude.

also, isn't the design precisely is what is being disputed? That you are so concerned about theoretical possibilities that you subject 90 year olds in wheelchairs to rigorous and invasive screening despite the very low likelihood of them being a threat.
That's not the level of "design" that I meant. What I cited was the principle that you can't rely on something that passenger says (whether about a disability or anything else) to affect the extent of the screening, only the method. I doubt anybody here disagrees with that.
RichardKenner is offline