We have several members of our families who refuse to fly and not all are elderly. One woman is very over weight and refuses to fly because she is embarrassed about needing an extender or ever 2 seats. Others are afraid of the TSA and the 3 ounce business.

There is no arguing with them about this. They either sit at home and refuse to travel at all or drive which is far more dangerous than flying.

Disabled travelers are also subjected to extra *security*, especially those who are in wheelchairs and cannot walk through. I sometimes use a wheelchair, but always get up and walk.

It is much like Alice in Wonderland now in Amerika. Common sense and reason has left the land and the lowest and most ignorant and uneducated are put in position of absolute rule over their betters with no appeal, justice or alternative.

Get used to it, accept it. YOUR ACCEPTANCE of this nonsense further facilitates future policing by unreasoning, barely functional, zero tolerance policing robots with the power to simply automatically taser anyone NOT conforming to their preset program. You DON'T have to imagine ROBO-COP to encounter such automated future policing. All it takes is a box in a hall programmed to zap any UNAUTHORIZED person who enters for whatever reason, or someone who steps across some line predetermined to be "off-limits" to someone else. You WILL cross at the cross-walk, OR ELSE, no excuses, no exceptions.

It sounds outrageous now, but mark my words, YOU WILL SEE IT IN YOUR LIFETIME if you live 10-15 more years.

The converse is true. If you have a FF account you are much less likely to be SSSS'd, even on one-way, last minute tickets. Who knows why, but it is true. Maybe it is because they can see that I have a pattern historically of buying last minute, one-way tix, so that is no longer a red flag, or maybe it is something else, but it definitely helps.

I would also agree with the observation that there are a number of one-way tix being purchased, especially since many more routes are priced as one-way trips instead of r/t these days.

I'm a knee replacement so are my mom and sister. They have such cards from their surgeon. They stopped carrying them as TSA ignores them.

I don't have one because the surgeon stopped giving them out as they were worthless. Anyone could get or counterfeit such a card. So all of us with joint replacements get to plan on an extra 10 minutes every time through security :)

I thought pacemakers weren't supposed to go through the WTMD at all over concerns the WTMD would interfere with its operation. (No idea if modern pacemakers are vulnerable to that or if it's a throwback.)

True, but there's got to be a better way than subjecting the disabled or people with joint replacements to a full grope. I'm very against strip-search machines, registered traveler, etc., but might consider limited voluntary use of such programs to avoid those gropes and the delay as an acceptable trade-off for these continuous victims.

My 84 year-old dad has had both knees replaced and still has a piece of a German bullet in his lung. This qualifies him as a terrorist. He gets a secondary every time he and my mom attempt the terrorist act of visiting their grandkids.

He has become pretty disgusted at the country he came "this close" to giving his life for back in 1944 while flying a fighter plane. Absolutely nobody from a blue-suited, brass-badged screener to Kippie to Skeletor (heck, even Bush II) can possibly understand his anger, nor would I expect them to.

I got pretty torqued just writing this post.

I was going to ask if you got singled out for secondaries a lot, Flies ... :p ;) :D

Are one way tickets still an SSSS trigger? A few years ago, I constructed a round trip out of two separate one way tickets on different airlines (which were not in the same alliance) because it was much cheaper that way than any other round trip that fit the schedule. No SSSS in either direction.

Another time, I did a similar thing because I could use a one way award ticket on one airline, but another airline offered a more convenient and cheaper return flight. No SSSS in either direction.

My understanding is that they've relaxed the requirements that airlines give SSSS to passengers that have frequent-flier accounts that are over a certain number of months old and/or have a certain amount of activity. That would exclude most FTers as long as they are flying their preferred airline or alliance.

Cee, does the persons idenity change just because the document expired?
Is the person represented on the document a different person?

Another asinine "stupid as a stump" process forced upon the public by TSA without any thought to the process!

If your not part of the solution then you are part of the problem!

In both cases where I used two one ways on different airlines to make a round trip (with no SSSS triggered), one half of the trip was on an airline I had not used before, though I did use frequent flyer numbers for mileage partner airlines in order to collect the mileage.

Unfortunately, an argument that we have made countless times here. Common sense plays no role in security.

Mike

I did 2 1 way trips on UA last month and didn't get the haraSSSSment flag either way.

What good is the ID card if you still need to get padded down. Apparently, if you have a pacemaker, you should always bypass and not walk through.