That's why the forum was split. This is the debate forum; you come here to debate. Coming here for advice without a debate is like going to Jiffy Lube looking for a car wash.

The other one is the practical forum. You go there for straightforward advice in a non-confrontational atmosphere.

Well....it's hard to give 'straightforward' advice about an agency that prides itself on incompetence, sorry, inconsistency.

I don't deny that. But opinions on that point are expressed HERE, rather than THERE. Over THERE, the answer to the question may be, "It's different every time" or "it varies according to airport" or "there are four possibilities, which one you get on any given flight is completely unpredictable". Those are factual answers; they may not be satisfactory, they may be frustrating, they may get your blood boiling, but they're factual. Then you come over HERE to vent on those answers for a dozen pages, while the factual answers remain uncluttered at the top of a short thread over THERE.

It's a good system, I think.

It's the DHS that needs dismantling, the b*st*rd child of 9/11.

If the TSA were under the aegis of a competent Department or agency there would be a better chance of some effective oversight (NB I said chance ;) ) . I don't know which one; the FAA comes to mind but they don't have a stellar reputation either. DoJ perhaps ?

+1. And there is one here that comes across with such an authoritarian attitude that it seems like all travelers are nothing better than prisoners that have lost constitutional rights.

Agree.

My laptop wallpaper is a photo of me taken on my first flight at age 7. It was taken on the ramp at DCA of me boarding a DC6. That inspired me to travel, see new sights, and enjoy not only the learning about different cultures but also the joy of traveling.

Unfortunately, the TSA has done far more to destroy the virtues and fun of traveling than anything else.

Hmpf!

...Okay, yeah, in all honesty? Those deep-rural Alabama accents get me from time to time, too. They're gone now - one retired, one resigned and moved on to become a professional photographer - but there were two in Huntsville that had really, really, really bad accents. The second one was getting ready to hand-wand a fellow and went through the whole spiel to him. When he was done, the passenger looked around and announced, quite loudly, if he could get someone in there who spoke English.

:D :D :D :D

Our supervisor lost it, she was laughing so hard.

That may have been funny at your airport, to your supervisor, but it isn't always the case. I was in JAX and after three tries of listening to someone who mumbled at me progressively louder like Charlie Brown's teacher, I finally said as politely as I could 'I'm sorry, I don't understand a word you are saying'. That resulted in a very aggressive response from the supervisors there.

Sometimes I think that you and gsoltso don't realise that what happens at your airport on your shift doesn't happen everywhere. As passengers we have no idea what the response may be, and what may set one person off on a tirade.

(And by the way, I have been to every corner of AL over the years, and been to many towns and places even people in AL find remarkable. I stopped flying in/out of AL whenever possible and drive from neighbouring states, or even MSY for Mobile area)

I understand completely. I have enough accounts from people here and other sites, that even if 50% of those are false accounts, then there are way too many people that just don't get it. There are times where being firm is required, but that doesn't alleviate the responsibility of being professional. Dean and I are lucky in that we work at locations that are smaller and more "homey" as they say around here. The longest wait time I have seen in the last couple of years was 19 minutes - and that was from arriving at the end of the TDC line until they passed through the WTMD and were standing beside their items. I understand that the pressure of working at a larger airport can get to you (I pulled a 30 day stint at LAX), but being professional keeps you out of trouble and makes it easier to resolve a situation than shouting and being unprofessional. This is not rocket science, it is a fairly simple process from beginning to end, why would anyone want to make that process any harder than it absolutely has to be?

Just a question, why are BDO's being the first trained on the ATR Strip Search Machines?

Nobody can predict what someone will do under severe emotional or financial pressure.

Gun Taken From Suicidal JetBlue Pilot in Crew Lounge

May 21, 2010

A JetBlue pilot who was abruptly removed from duty in the crew lounge of Boston's Logan International Airport was carrying a gun, a Massachusetts State Police spokesman told ABC News.

JetBlue issued a statement today saying the pilot was relieved of duty for health reasons, but denied reports that he had sent a text message threatening to crash the plane.



The same could be said for anybody with some experience dealing with the public in the service industry.

^

Anything is possible, but is this probable? I would say no.


We had a FedEx guy on the jumpseat not long after this happened. He mentioned that the cockpit was... I'll just say a mess after that incident.

Completely agreed.

Well, high probability, no. Over 50%? No. But possible, and something that should be thought about a bit? Absolutely. We are spending a huge amount of money and resources thinking that Joe Schmoe has a bomb in his pants. Is THAT possible? Yes, probable? no. I'm just pointing out that we should not create additional huge holes in security while worrying about even more remote threats.

The 9/11 student pilots were pretty obvious by today's standards and poor students, but were still largely ignored. Pilot background checks will be a bit more thorough nowadays, and people will be more likely to report "suspicious" pilots, but there are far too many trainees and junior pilots for this sort of thing to be perfectly reliable. Having a sympathetic pilot or two somewhere in America would be quite valuable to a terrorist organization.

Yeah, what a horrific incident. I remember once listening to the audio of it, but I won't again. Awful. I think all of those guys (including the offender) are still alive -- he is in a prison somewhere forever.

Argh. Terrorist "organizations" are mostly loosely affiliated groups of wackjobs whose particular brand of wackotude happens to be similar. The idea that al Qaeda is some vast, global, well-organized, well-funded, well-trained paramilitary organization akin to SPECTRE* is simply not so; it stems from the American arrogance that "no little group of loonies could have pulled off something as complex as 9/11 right under the noses of the smartest, coolest, badest-assed country on Earth! They MUST be some sort of super-duper terrorist Legion of Doom, with resources all over the world!" Nope. Simply not true.

The sad truth is that small terrorist groups (I refuse to call them "cells" because that implies that they're small parts of a huge network, like the French Resistance or the Bieber Fan Club) are perfectly capable of pulling off large, well-planned, successful attacks. In fact, they're much more likely to be successful. You see, everybody knows that the best way to keep a secret is to NOT TELL EVERYBODY, so the more people you have in your al Qaeda Local Lodge #578, the more likely you are to have one of them get cheesed off that he wasn't elected Grand Poobah or given the keys to the Mystery Machine, and either split the group or go squeal to the FBI out of spite.

Besides, 9/11 wasn't nearly as complex as we like to think. Sure, it wasn't easy, but the hardest part of the whole plan was finding 20 guys who were both crazy enough to kill themselves and not stupid enough to go postal in the terminal and give the whole thing away before they got off the ground. Coordination? One guy picks four flights and buys 20 tickets. Timing? Heck, the AIRLINES took care of the timing on 9/11 - the flights were all scheduled. Precision? Well, there I have to hand it to the hijackers; 75% of them were able to hijack the planes, find their targets, and fly the planes into them. I don't doubt that, had the passengers on United 93 not rebelled and been within a hair's breadth of re-taking the plane, it would have hit its intended target, as well. But I have to give as much credit to the flight instructors in Florida who unwittingly taught the hijackers their air navigation skills, as I do to the hijackers themselves.

Basically, although there is danger, and there are nutbars out there who want to kill us, the threat is so wildly overblown by paranoia that we've put ourselves back into a never-ending Cold War that will eventually lead us to destroy ourselves, or the rest of the world to step in and put an end to the madness.

All of this has happened before. All of it will happen again. And when it happens, it's never pretty.

I generally agree with that, and I'm not sure why you are ranting like this because nobody really said anything different.

Taking an ideological 21 year old and saying, "get an ATP certificate" is not that difficult, in the numerous and somewhat anonymous "zero to hero" programs, can be done quite rapidly, and it would not be remotely financially prohibitive.

Nobody said that terrorist organizations were highly sophisticated or organized; they don't have to be.

He is still a TSO. Ridicule by others is unnecessary and some of us will attack them as long as they attack us at the CP. I think it's quite nice.

Thought you were talking about FT for a sec. ;)

Who's up for an early January "mileage run?" It would be a good excuse to attend "occupy cupcakes!"