YORK, Jan. 7 — Did you pack your bags yourself? Have they been out of your possession? The questions asked of airline passengers aren’t designed to trip up a terrorist, and that raises another question: Should passenger questioning be tougher?

ISRAEL’S AIRLINE, El Al, routinely interrogates passengers boarding its flights, often probing their background and travel plans. But its operation is a tiny fraction of the U.S. aviation system, and El Al’s painstaking security methods would not transfer easily to U.S. airlines.

Some aviation security experts say tougher questioning could be a valuable tool in the United States, at least in theory. In practice, they admit, it would be unfeasible to subject all U.S. passengers to such interrogation and difficult to find an acceptable method of selecting a subset of travelers to be grilled.

Mary Schiavo, a former Transportation Department inspector general and now a lawyer for victims of airline accidents, said intensified questioning would be worth trying — but only after expert profilers developed an effective set of questions.

“We’d like to see a more scientific basis,” she said. “Just delaying people while we ask more inane questions won’t get us anywhere.”

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