Originally Posted by Bart
With all the popular references to "shoe carnival" and "shoe fetish," I am curious how some of you frequent flyers suggest we screeners handle the Richard Reid shoe-bomb type threat. Some of you will go into hyperbole overdrive and come up with scenarios involving bombs inserted inside underwear or body cavities, and others will react with emotional responses about how your rights are being infringed upon, blah blah blah. Not interested in those responses.
The Shoe Fetish and Carnival comments are about airports that obviously ignore the 1" criteria and require all shoes to be removed or an automatic secondary occurs.
Originally Posted by Bart
The fact is that a terrorist attempted to bring down a commercial airliner by removing the padding from inside his footwear and replacing it with explosive materials to be detonated during the flight. This suggests that there may be another attempt with a perhaps more sophisticated or better designed "shoe bomb" some time in the future. After all, the terrorists aren't dumb; they have their own version of post-op after-action reviews for lessons learned.
A terrorist
attempted to bring down an airliner. He
FAILED. I do agree that terrorist are not dumb, in fact they are smarter than 90% of the management of the TSA. That's why the TSA should focus on other areas of concern. The next attempt will not be a shoe.
Originally Posted by Bart
1) Should we just ignore the threat of shoe bombs completely and rely on the statistical probability that a significant majority of passenger footwear do not have explosives inserted inside of them? Is passenger convenience the priority here?
There must be a balance between the billions of dollars wasted by the TSA's actions (Not just the TSA budget, but money wasted by pax in terms of wasted time) and the threat. There is a very
TINY threat of a shoe bomb (see above), therefore, the TSA should not be devoting so much time and energy to this "threat".
Originally Posted by Bart
2) For those of you who believe that something needs to be done to prevent a shoe bomb from being smuggled through security, is there a better method than the current procedure? If so, I'm interested in your suggestion. Please understand that if you're going to propose better technologies such as the walk-thru explosives detection portal, there's a cost associated with that. Should EPTs be installed at every airport? Only major hubs? At only certain cities? Use your thinking caps; money doesn't grow on trees, you know.
The money is there, the TSA management just will not allocate it properly. If this type of technology was deployed at every airport, at least one screener per checkpoint could be eliminated. That is a real cost savings right there. Additionally, there is far too much overhead at each airport as it is:
AFSD (minimum of 2 per airport)
Screening Manager (Unknown number per airport)
Supervisors (WAY too many of these)
Leads (With the above, what the heck is this position?)
5-6 Screeners per checkpoint
That is ridiculous. If the TSA would staff the airports properly, there would be plenty of money for this technology. Do I think this will ever happen, No. The TSA is top heavy with washouts from the Coast Guard. These washouts have no security experience, thus they will never run this agency properly.
Originally Posted by Bart
3) For those of you who truly, honestly, in your heart-of-hearts, believe that the Richard Reid incident was a one-in-a-million occurence, please explain your rationale. I am genuinely curious how you can dismiss it so easily.
It's more than 1 in a million. How many passengers have been screened since this incident? 100's of Millions? How many had a bomb in their shoe? ZERO. The odds are at 1 in 100's of millions and growing.
Originally Posted by Bart
I'm looking for reasoned responses here. There's enough whining and complaining in here to take up a lot of bandwidth, and I'll simply ignore the standard FrequentWhiner cliche' responses. I'm looking for a true discussion.
Here's your discussion. I honestly value your input here and have a question of my own:
Don't you think that we as FF's are tired of the whining from the TSA regulars here?