Originally Posted by FliesWay2Much

I think it's clear we've lost sight of why we do this because the reason hasn't jumped out at any of us.

If you jump back to 1973, people got tired of being hijacked to Cuba. Actually, this was a localized event (SE USA). For example, nobody flying from LAX-SEA had to worry about being hijacked to Cuba.

For the airlines, screening for weapons used to hijack an airliner started out as a liability and risk issue. A diversion to Cuba was a diversion that added physical risk and inconvenience. More violent Middle Eastern hijackings upped the ante as the decade rolled on. I recall, here in the US, there were a few isolated violent incidents. I remember that there was a PSA flight on which a guy snuck a gun on board, shot the pilots and then deliberately crashed it into the San Joaquin valley near Fresno. The guy apparently had a death wish resulting from severe depression. Although the stakes have changed quite a bit, I've got to believe the airlines' main reason for screening is economic.

For the government, it's always been a political issue. We started out by wanting to avoid political embarassment in front of Castro by flights visiting Havana. The government had to do "something" that officials could hang their hats on when it came time for reelection. This has evolved into today's TSA, whose main role in life is social engineering and demanding compliance. This is certainly doing "something."

I don't think anyone objects to basic screening. I certainly don't from the economic/liability/added risk perspective. The "national security" reasons we've convinced ourselves exist are just just a few of many dozens of national security threats. If you were to rank-order them, I'm not sure turning airliners into cruise missiles would make the top ten. So, I see very little value-added coming from the "threat" reasons why we screen. Screening for bombs in cargo or checked luggage is really an economic issue. The reality is that an airliner blown to bits raining small pieces of itself over a wide area is not much of a national security threat, but it sure is a huge economic threat to the airline whose asset gets blown up.

Over the last several years, we've had hoards of government people descending on our airports telling directors and CEOs how to do their jobs and dictating what's important. Security screening is just one of many things that an airline or airport executive worries about. By forcing Dirty Harry wannabe's on these folks from the FSD down to the individual screeners (not even counting all the HQ pukes), we've created an adversarial environment rather than a cooperative one. Real security, in its proper context, results from a cooperative relationship between security and the enterprise. The government ought to be an enabler to the transportation industry, not a hindrance.

Just out of curiosity, I wonder if there are any figures out there of recorded violent incidents on airliners before there was any weapons screening? To be meaningful, these data would have to be normalized to incidents per something in order to be relevant to today.