You misunderstood. Every time these things are introduced as some great thing, they impact a very small percentage of travellers.

There is NO reason for the shoe carnival, the name game, the rudeness and ignorance from the screeners, and the scanners as primary. NONE. Yet most people outside of a few websites seem to accept them as the reality of air travel today.

That saddens me. There is no reason why most travellers at American airports need to undergo that type of 'screening'.

Traveling without your nitro is too big a risk. I recommend that you remove them from the original bottle and put them in a standard unlabeled pill carrier, which you can get at any pharmacy. You can still put the empty original bottle in your luggage, but while transiting the c/p, you can keep the nitro pills anonymous.

If asked what they are, all you have to say is, "Those are my heart pills."

Or (accompanied by an evil, sarcastic snicker) "my AFS candy".

Saw a TSA K-9 unit in ORD UA baggage claim yesterday afternoon.

Sniffer dogs is baggage claim is like gate gropes: indicates a thorough job was not done at the initial checkpoint.

Or, they are looking for drugs.

Did not see any dogs in use at DEN this morning. I did see plenty of sheeplike being herded through the NoS. with the exception of one non NoS lane, all WTMDs were roped off Smooth sailing through PreCheck..

I hope this isn't part of a larger plan to replace the barking and herding TSOs at the checkpoint with dogs. I wonder how long before they are roaming the sterile area and doing last minute gate sniffs?

TSA�s security in AA�s terminal two is now implementing a dog check program that wasn�t here a few days ago. There is an additional snaking line to walk twice past sniffer dogs. Clear told me it was added this week. It causes a horrendous length line into the terminal open area, but it moves pretty fast as the dogs don�t seem to find anything they need to look at. Clear clients get run through the line too, but get to do a partial cut. My guess is this procedure adds 10 minutes to the morning checkin for regular TSA precheck folks.

What happens if you say you are allergic to dogs and tell them not to come near you?

As this is a TSA issue and not directly AA, I'll move this over to the Travel Safety Security-->Debate forum.

Since I also moderate over there, if the thread does develop an AA twist, I can move it back.

Thanks.



aztimm

I am very afraid of dogs I dont know. I start to shake and I do back off. guess they going to look at me as hiding something. Sigh.

If it’s meant to work like it was claimed to work at ORD, it should speed up things overall by increasing the proportion of people who get screened more akin to the PreCheck screening way.

Chicago, for example, paid for the canine teams at ORD and it did so as to cut down TSA screening delays at the airport. Thereafter, the Chicago government establishment claimed credit for the crowding/delay alleviation and credited their decision to pay for canine teams to get that apparent improvement.

For those who don't know better, the dogs are mostly there to provide dumb people a (false) sense of security, and the ill-defined "drug dance" that is supposed to be a lawful "alert" is just a scheme for cops to circumvent the 4th Amendment.
(I've seen Customs officers take the stand to define the "drug dance" and it's obvious they're just confabulating, and the courts are too complicit in the whole Drug War/Terrorism mania industry to end this.)
Ingredients for bombs vary considerably (not some magic 'unique' scent)and masked with perfumes etc there's no way dogs would smell them in a moving target. Drugs other than marijuana are most often odorless, and non-volatile, so those too are not something dogs are going to detect, especially if masked. But if they want to escalate the whole Security Theater charade, more power to 'em.
After all, they don't have much else to do these days.

Do we know if these are drug or explosives trained dogs, or is TSA claiming they�re trained for both?

TSA claims that they do not have drug detection canines used for baggage screening.