How much do you make an hour working for TSA?
How many hours a week do you work?
Curious what pays college bills these days.

I know virtually nothing about chemistry, so I'm not going to be able to help in the chemistry argument, but assuming that eyecue is correct, what's to stop someone from putting Chemical A in a glass vial in their left pocket and Chemical B in a glass vial in their right pocket and making explosion soup on the plane? Seems to me that metal detectors don't do much about detecting explosives.

As for the fact that the OP is at my home airport, I am that much more scared. Hope he (she?) doesn't work at Terminal B.

Mike

Untrue. Got a source?

There are no innocuous, non-explosives that can be dumped together with no time/temperature contols, resulting in a credible explosive like TATP or nitroglycerine.

Show me the money!

Clearly, Spiff, you've never seen Die Hard With a Vengeance.

Mike

Please note, that statement was only a joke. Repeat, only a joke. In the case of a serious statement, I would have used a higher quality movie, like Die Hard 2.

Comrade Hawley stars in

Lie Hard with Incompetence

Spiff, Dear Old Friend and Dear Soul,

I have to disagree with you on this somber and solitary occasion. Two liquids which are benign individually are

A) bottled water, and

B) any TSO's brain.

Mix the two at a CP and the situation becomes explosive.

My tuition here at UCSB was 2800 dollars for the quarter, not including books... Harrumph - I recall those glorious days at the C.C, 18 bucks a unit and the classes were 30 instead of 300 students, and taught by a professor rather than a graduate student...

Anywho, I make 15.60 an hour here, work 32 hours a week.

Not directed at me, but thought I'd chime in... I'm at small airport, so the TSA isn't such a nightmare to work for, though it is... interesting.

I would disagree with you. in most cases... item "B" is not liquid..
just some vapors.

Some might question how intelligent it is to give up six figures to work for the TSA.


Too bad there are TSA screeners who use then quibble over whether a small container inside the quart baggie is 4 oz or 3.4 oz, etc. If this was truly about measuring the amount of liquid, there'd be no concern over individual item size so long as it fit in the baggie.


If you explore this forum, you will find links where chemistry experts have been quoted as saying the threats, as described by the authorities, are not credible for various reasons. To summarize a few:

• It is impossible to make any of the typically-discussed liquid-based explosives onboard a plane. You just can't mix them together; they require controlled conditions and time that isn't available on even transatlantic flights.
• Most (if not the vast majority) of liquid explosives require constituent parts that will alarm the ETD machines. Proper screening would catch these materials without an all-out liquid ban.

Not to mention the fact that there are so many ways someone could STILL smuggle liquids onto a plane that the baggies and water carnival are sheer idiocy designed entirely for window dressing. And if the TSA is so worried about the threat of liquids being used in bombs, then why do they just dump them all in a trash can? If they had any expectation whatsoever that any of them were dangerous in any way, then this would be a huge disaster waiting to happen. Ergo, no one expects the confiscated liquids to be a threat at all.

There are some commercially-available binary explosives that can be mixed without time/temperature controls and be rendered explosive.

However, these all have downsides that render them unsuitable for use as a weapon to bring down a plane, if the TSA does their job correctly.

For example, many depend upon nitromethane as the liquid component. This isn't exactly an innocuous compound. ETD would flag it in a heartbeat. It's toxic. It's flammable. It smells funny. Etc., etc.

Most that I am aware of also require a detonator; you can't just shock them like TATP or nitroglycerine. That means the terrorist also has to get their detonator onto the plane.

Then again, since places like EWR fail at 90%+ in detecting potential bomb components, I guess getting these things onto the plane is actually fairly simple. But nothing the TSA currently does would stop these threats at all, either!!!

(And I have yet to hear the water ban apologists explain to me why liquids are such a more credible threat than solid explosives, which presumably could with all the focus on liquids be smuggled onto a plane without a problem... put a slab of one inside a walkman, a laptop's spare battery, etc.--if you don't get ETD'd, you're golden!)

That's an easy explanation: According to the TSA philosophy a threat is not a threat until it has been tried once. Nobody has reported that solid explosives have been in used the passenger cabin to take down an airliner so therefore it is not necessary to check for those.

I guess whoever ordered to purchase the puffers was told of his blunder and then told to remove them from regular use

All I have seen are 1 solid + 1 liquid binaries. I have yet to see two liquids.

That's really the problem - TSA refuses to properly employ explosives detection technology and instead uses useless harassment as a poor substitute.

You are quite correct about nitromethane. ETP or ETD would pick it up in a heartbeat. Too bad Comrade Hawley is too stupid to use such technology and prefers to make us less safe. He should be caned and fired.

I'm not a chemist by any stretch of the imagination. It seems to me that chemicals that go "boom" must have some sort of inherent instability or they wouldn't go "boom".

I do know a thing or two about rocket fuels. The basic chemicals that make up hypergolic propellant (ignites on contact with each other) are, in of themselves, highly toxic if not handled correctly. The oxidizer, nitrogen tetroxide, is very efficient at oxidizing your lungs if you inhale only a small quantity. The fuel, various forms of hydrazine, is basically an acid. You couldn't handle them without full SCAPE suits. Without being in a pressurized container, all they would do is to make a flash when they came in contact and quickly burn -- no explosion.

Solid propellant is made of benign stuff and must be carefully mixed together in liquid form first -- pretty much like making a cake. The oxidizer is ammonium perchlorate and the fuel is typically aluminum. There are other benign chemicals added as bonding agents. The fuel has the consistency of a pencil eraser. You can basically mold it into any shape you want, provided you survive the mixing operation. It won't ignite unless you apply a hot flame or you create a jagged edge, from which you can ignite it by friction. Again, it won't explode -- only burn. You can't put it out once it ignites and it burns at about 5000 degrees F, and the only thing you would succeed doing would be to burn a hole through the floor. I've carried inert pull-test samples (look like dog bones) through various checkpoints every once in a while. The only thing different from the real thing was that table salt was substituted for the ammonium perchlorate.

You're right on that... same here; it's all been solid + liquid binaries that I've come across.



I for one wish to add a personal boot to his behind on his way out the door.

Who is starting a petition? i'll sign it...