jfulcher

Are you referring to the ATL airport? That's the busiest one in the world (for a while now), but I thought you were talking about airports in Texas.

ND Sol

My mistake, you are right that ATL overtook it a few years ago.

jkhuggins

Three points in reply:

1. The way it works is not necessarily the way it has to work in the future. We can always work to make it better.

2. I don't know what "the will of the people" is -- either on health care, or on TSA procedures. (Let's drop the health care example, so that we don't get dragged down into OMNI.) TSA claims that 95% of passengers approve of their procedures ... with little or no documentation as to how that number is justified. On the other side, postings on public blogs, forums like FT, and newspaper articles seem overwhelmingly against the TSA and its procedures ... with no indication as to whether or not those negative posters are simply the same folks posting over and over again. No-one, on either side of the issue, has convinced me convincingly what "the will of the people" is on TSA --- and so each side claims that "the will of the people" is with them.

3. "The will of the people" is, at times, irrelevant. If the will of the people is unjust or immoral, then it deserves to be ignored. The question should not be "do most people agree with this?". The question should be "is it right?"

Gaucho100K

Wirelessly posted (Nokia N97 / Palm TX: Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.4; Series60/5.0 NokiaN97-3/10.2.012; Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1; en-us) AppleWebKit/525 (KHTML, like Gecko) WicKed/7.1.12344)

bingo!!

khurley

All this is nothing. It's only a matter of time before some idiot gets caught with a vague idea of creating a bomb disguised to look like a Snickers bar.

PatrickHenry1775

"Mmmm ... still fresh!" (I know, it was actually a Baby Ruth bar)

goalie

good one ^ but that would be fine with me as i despise snickers bars and blowing one up means there's one less in the world . now, three musketeers (or milky ways for goalie-mom) on the other hand.....them's fightin' words

TSORon

OUCH! Well said Jim. ^

Given the percentage of people who actually exercise their right to vote now days, its kind of difficult to determine "what" the will of the people is.

I cant speak for other airports, but at mine the supervisors keep track of the number of compliments and complaints they receive each shift. Verbal and written. And they pass this information along to the TSA Customer Support Manager, who is responsible for tracking the data and reporting it to HQ. I get to see this data on occasion, and must say that the 95% you quote is quite low, at least for my airport. 99% would be closer. Now, of course that is not an indication of how people think about TSA in general, but it is a great indicator on how well the TSO's I work with treat the passengers.

Most people seem to know that this is a thankless job, and they take the time to thank us anyway. We get the occasional complaint, and in most cases its about the process and not the individual TSO's. Even those are rare.

Superguy

That also makes the assumption that complaints are recorded and not ignored or put in the garbage if in writing. I'm serious about that - DEN has a history of complaints disappearing. Awhile back, they claimed they had less than a dozen in a year and I know people that filed more than that over the course of that time.

In any service industry, it's easy to "forget" the bad stuff and pad statistics.

Quite honestly, the TSA doesn't rank down with the IRS in most despised agency if it's getting in the neighborhood of 95-99% compliment rate.

whitearrow

I'm sorry to interrupt, but -- is there ANYTHING at all the TSO folk can tell us about the original topic of powders?

Women are going to be disproportionately impacted by this, just as we were by the liquids ban, and it would be nice not to have it sprung on me at 6 am on a Monday morning when I'm trying to get somewhere.

sethb

Remind me to stay off any bridges you designed.

sethb

When they start digging through powders, I'm going to start carrying powdered garlic just in case I run into something that needs flavoring.

jkhuggins

I suspect, however, that there's a major problem with that statistic. How does the number of compliments and complaints compare with the total number of people who pass through the checkpoint? I suspect that the number of people who say nothing is far larger than the set of people who offer complaints or compliments --- probably by an order of magnitude. So, how do we interpret that silence?

If you like TSA, you'll be likely to claim that the silent ones also like TSA, because they're not complaining. If you don't like TSA, you'll be likely to claim that the silent ones also don't like TSA, because they've learned that expressing a negative opinion at the checkpoint rarely leads to a good result ... and has the potential to lead to bad results (being charged with "interfering with the screening process", being given a retaliatory secondary screening, etc.).

The truth is: we can't read anything into silence. We don't know what the silent majority thinks about TSA, because they're silent on the issue.

RadioGirl

Label some innocent powder as "a*thr*x" and say "ooooh, I don't think you should open that!!"

warning1369

Yeap good chance