There was a story in the LA Times yesterday about an elite level frequent flyer on American Airlines who experienced some truly horrendous treatment on a couple of AA flights. Although the story relates several of his experiences on AA, the most notable was a flight from LA to London that was diverted to JFK due to a flight attendant who’d mistakenly thought she’d seen this gentleman on the employee bus. Thinking the passenger had circumvented security, she advised the cockpit crew and the decision was made to divert to JFK. This incident was widely reported at the time.
It’s easy to read this story and decide that the flight crew involved overreacted and that this is racial profiling, plane and simple. It is also easy to forget that about 6 and 1/2 years ago ~2,800 people went to work not expecting or deserving to die, but they did.
It is frustrating when I read stories about this misplaced suspicion that causes flights to divert, or when someone runs through a security screening checkpoint and a concourse is shut down for 4 hours. Relying on physical security alone isn’t going to cut it. We regularly read about airport security failures; just Google “Airport Security Failures” and check it out.
Airline flight crews deal with airport security every day and know well its absurdity; perhaps that explains (though doesn’t justify) the American Airlines flight attendant’s actions on the L.A – London flight. It’s virtually impossible to keep all sharp objects and liquids in containers larger than 4 oz. of of commercial airplanes 100% of the time.
I recall a flight I took to Reagan National Airport in November 2001 that illustrated this fact. At the time passengers weren’t allowed to leave their seats for the last 30 minutes of the arrival and flights to Washington received a second security screening at the boarding gate. On this particular flight they also had a bomb sniffing dog do a once through the airplane before we boarded. However the dog wasn’t trained to detect hand tools.
Upon arrival in D.C. and as the aircraft rolled out on the runway I felt something roll into my foot. I looked down and there laying next to my foot was a 6 ” long screwdriver, evidently left onboard by a mechanic during some previous maintenance work. I thought about telling the flight attendant but then realized I’d be spending the next 4-5 hours talking to the D.C. police, so I discreetly put it in my briefcase.
When I departed DCA for the return trip I forgot the screwdriver was still in my briefcase until I laid it on the x-ray machine belt during the security screening process. No big deal, they can just confiscate it and I’ll be on my way. Except they didn’t detect it. The offending screwdriver now hangs on my garage wall next to my other hand tools.
The moral of the story is that it isn’t the sharp object from which we need protection; it is the person that would use the object to cause us harm on the airplane. And I am not talking about CAPPS II or whatever iteration is currently being contemplated. We don’t need a mega database with everyone’s credit information and other personal data so the government can spy on us.
In a previous life I worked for a company that proposed to the TSA a method to utilize the data that is present in airline reservations to provide real time responses to queries about the data. Things like – show me all of the reservations booked between W and X dates for travel out of Y airport on or after Z date. Designed to be used by security or law enforcement agencies, it would be a tool to confirm intelligence from the field. So if information was that bad guys were planning to do bad things to flights leaving London and bound for the USA next month, this tool could help find those reservations made by the bad guys. No credit checks, no social security numbers, no data enhancement, no billion dollar capitol cost to set it up. Just use whatever is in the reservation and don’t bloat it (and make it slower) with useless personal data.
Instead of looking for weapons that have been tried in the past – shoe bombs, liquid explosives, or box cutters, let’s just look for the bad guys. One thing every bad guy needs to accomplish their dastardly deed is a reservation.
Unfortunately what happened with CAPPS II was that the big government contractors smelled cash and lined up at the trough for their fair share. Ultimately there was a lot of money spent with no beneficial result, and the companies involved had the added bonus of defending themselves in various class action cases brought by privacy advocates. Although it supposedly was killed by TSA, it has been reported that they will continue to develop an “automated passenger pre-screening system”. Oh goodie.
Fast forward 6 years and we are still looking for sharp objects and liquids at security checkpoints, taking off our shoes and belts, and diverting flights because we are not sure whether someone is a threat, or just a really good customer who happens to fly a lot.