Looks like some sort of security test by some government or news agency to me rather than a real threat dry run. Why on earth would anyone with a sinister plan try to pack all sorts of suspicious items simultaneously in a single package??? What would be the purpose of having a bunch of knives in checked luggage? :confused:
Not buying this.

This is interesting because it's the case of luggage going where the pax doesn't. Isn't this the classic lost/diverted luggage argument? "So, my luggage is on a plane to some place else? What if a terrorist put a bomb on a plane and didn't get on the plane??"
I look forward to what further genius regulations will be placed upon airlines to ensure that luggage matches passengers on the plane.

Pen-testing. Good guys do it, bad guys do it--no way to tell the source. I hope it doesn't change regulation, just clarifies it.

Isn't it already the case that, for international flights, if a passenger doesn't turn up then their luggage is offloaded before the flight departs? Does this same rule not apply for domestic flights?

I believe it is except for the fact that its not always followed/enforced. For ex I was VDB'd on a HNL-DFW-LGA flight on AA a couple weeks ago. I was re-reouted the following morning HNL-LAX-JFK while my bags stayed on my original flights. AA had to send my bag via courier from LGA-JFK.....Obviously relying on a VDB situation to conduct a terrorist attack is unlikely to lead to a high rate of success but I'm just sayin, bags don't always travel with their owner.

Maybe trying to find the "sweet spot" for arousing suspicion....is it just one weird item that will get them tagged? Two? How about 4? Does $7,000 in cash get secondary questioning? How about $3,000? $1,500?

A dry run of any sort, conducted by a good planner, is rarely a single-time experience...you look at different scenarios and based on the resulting experiences figure out what the optimal solution is and go from there. I'm sure there have been dozens of tests similar to this one, but with different variables, which have either gone unnoticed by the TSA or un-reported by the media.

That is what M Atta did Aug 2001 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Atta


Also what Yousef did in 1994 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka

No knowledge that this was a "dry run" or a test, but why risk it when the cost of failure is so high? Imagine how much of a pain airport security would be of Bojinka "succeeded", and how we would have woken up to disaster on a scale never before conceived by flyers until 7 years later.

They boarded air marshals on the ORD-AMS flight. If the two guys did something bad in the flight, they would have been caught right there. Now they didn't do anything on the flight, so they still can be and get detained in AMS. There is really no hurry to stop those two in ORD. The security response seems fair to me.

Unless they had a way to cause a fire or explosion before the marshalls could respond.

Those are all domestic flights. Positive bag match is only for International flights.

but they didn't.. so I agree it was under control.

This is what I don't understand from the reports out as of now. Did the US authorities know exactly what was in the bag before it took off (and that it wasn't harmful), though decided to put some marshals on the plane and observe behavior? Or were they doing some catch up on a flight that was already in the air when they came across this? That hardly seems like the system "did its job".

As this thread is understandably focused on travel security issues, please follow as it moves to FlyerTalk's forum on the subject. Ocn Vw 1K, Moderator, TravelBuzz.

That's incorrect. It exists for domestic as well.

And rather than merge / mix up the conversation of two threads, I'm going to lock this one and ask that everyone continue the conversation in the existing TSS thread: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...terrorism.html

scoow
TS/S co-moderator