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.
Thank you - that's exactly what I meant by "risk assessment vs risk avoidance."
Originally Posted by
RichardKenner
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?
You've now shifted the discussion from nachtnebel's "85-year old barely moving in a walker, or an emaciated man in a wheelchair" to a 30-year-old in a wheelchair.
The wheelchair is a discriminant, and needs to be taken into account, because it is the wheelchair that makes it impossible for the passenger to simply proceed through the WTMD (or the scanner, for that matter) and requires that the TSA screener and passenger come to some other arrangement. An 85-year-old man on his own two feet, without a wheelchair, walker, cane or metal implants should be able to walk through the WTMD without any discussion.
It's not up to TSA to decide, but some common sense could help. I would have to argue that an 85-year-old barely moving in a walker or an emaciated man in a wheelchair is, a priori, unlikely to be faking it. A athletic-looking, alert young person in a wheelchair might be a terrorist in disguise. Or he might be a football player who just had knee surgery.
Risk assessment would say, "there is a 0.0000001% chance than
any one of these passengers is a terrorist. The chance that this elderly, frail gentleman in his own wheelchair whose wife says he can't stand, much less walk, is even
less likely to be a terrorist. I do not, therefore, need to insist that he goes through the WTMD to see if he's hiding a gun in his crotch."
Risk avoidance says, "I read on the TSA blog that terrorists
might recruit an elderly person to smuggle weapons through a checkpoint in a wheelchair and they
might have done it and it
might be THIS man so I'd better give him extra scrutiny."
Regardless, if TSA has screening methods for paraplegics or quadriplegics that can be done without them leaving the wheelchair (and they say they do), this should be offered FIRST to anyone in a wheelchair, whether they're 30 or 85. Then they don't
need to rely on what the passenger says about their disability. If the passenger
offers to make things easier/faster by walking through the WTMD (or the scanner), okay.
TSA claims they can adequately screen someone who is seated in a wheelchair. Doing this as default for anyone in a wheelchair should therefore not reduce the "extent of screening", it just means more work for the screener.
As for statistics, obviously not every disabled person is badly treated at every checkpoint. But there are too many individual, documented cases to just shrug it off. And I note the survey above which determined that 75% of amputees were not happy with the way they'd been treated at airport security. That points to more than 1 or 2 bad screeners.