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(c) Elliott Publishing.

Serious About Security
Cheap Charlie · December 11, 2001

It's been about three months since 9/11 and the airport security hasn't seemed to really focus on the important stuff yet. My feelings are that the age of hijackings is over. That's right, we really don't need to check everyone for the tiniest of weapons when they board the plane.

Hijackings and takeovers of airplanes to use them as weapons will not happen again.

1. Pilots will stay barricaded in the cockpit and will land the plane at the nearest airport.

2. Passengers will leap upon any hijacker or group of hijackers and will tear them apart with their bare fingers like on UAL Flight 93.

3. Flight attendants will steer food carts across the cockpit door and douse the terrorists with hot coffee and make access very difficult, especially with passengers pounding on the potential hijackers.

4. Many passengers, except those on US Airways, will throw pillows at the hijackers who will be confused by the flurry of fluff flying their way.

5. If there are air marshals on the flight, the hijackers will be shot.

6. If, after all this activity, the hijackers finally make it into the cockpit, the hijackers will be subjected to stun guns and hatchets.

7. If all this fails, the entire plane will be shot out of the sky by streaking Air Force fighter jets.
Suffice it to say, the old-time hijackings are a thing of the past. The poor disgruntled neo-Communist Cuban who wants to go home just won't have a chance. Kidnappers looking for a quick ransom can no longer look this way. Thieves with parachutes can no longer rob passengers then leap out of the plane over the wilderness. Disaffected political groups will need another method to appear on the local and national newscasts.

These, however, are the yesterday-scenarios that the government seems to have focused upon and that we travelers are suffering through.

Long lines face us when going through security. We have given up hundreds of thousands of nail clippers. Millions of tiny files have been broken off many of these nail clippers. The makers of the tiny inch-and-a-half-long Victorinox Swiss army knives are probably working overtime to replace the knives authorities have been confiscating at security checks at airports.

In our American-Civil-Liberty way we are going overboard to insure that no one can be accused of "profiling." I have seen crippled 80-year-olds, stooped-over women with walkers and mothers with screaming children frisked and detained for an in-depth search of their luggage. This is our national proof that we wouldn't stoop to "profiling."

We (our government) foolishly, and great expense in both dollars and credibility, treat everyone the same. That is a noble cause. However, this is neither the time nor place to engage in such silly efforts.

I have been told stories of male security personnel feeling up women's breasts in search for their underwire bra. Normally there would have been a female security person, however, the woman was busy elsewhere and when the passenger protested, the male security guard told her, "You can wait, but you won't get on this plane." Hence the indignity of a hands-on search.

Don't take my word for this. Newspapers and magazines are now beginning to fill up with indignant articles ridiculing the nail clipper and tweezers approach to passenger pocket and luggage searches and near cavity-searches for those "randomly selected."

Pleeeeeeease. Enough already. To #@!% with random sellection.

Let's try to deal with some reality instead of trying to look like or pretend that the airports and the government are providing security. The real threat is not pen knives and nail clipper files.

The real threat is explosives. The FAA is all too eager to station the National Guard at the security checkpoints. Security personnel are all too eager to search the aged and infirmed and buxom blondes. The government is ready to create an entire branch of government to protect us from something that won't happen.

But when you ask the FAA about the installation of explosive sniffing machinery, they moan and groan about not having enough time, about problems with delaying flights, the limitations of manufacturing bottlenecks, limited resources and having too much else to get done.

For heaven's sake, this is the real problem. Wake up FAA. Let's get the proper machinery up and running. We have a bunch of it already installed, but it is not being used to capacity. We manufacture it here in the U.S.A. We need it.

Call your congressmen. Call your senators. Call the President. Call the airlines. Complain.

We need state-of-the-art machinery that will scan all luggage for explosives - both carry-on and checked luggage. There is a saying: "Where there is a will, there is a way." Unfortunately the FAA has no will to solve this problem. Their first response is, "We can't do it." It is a pain in their bureaucratic rear end.

The FAA is confiscating pen knives, tweezers and nail clippers while the airport threat is only growing.

This is fluff and is making a mockery of real security. It was, a couple of months ago, something that passengers for a short time put up with, but now rebellion is rearing its head as it always does with foolish government approaches to crises.

Let's get serious. The longer we take, the more serious the threat becomes.


Charlie Leocha is the Boston-based author of Travel Rights: Know the Rules of the Road and the Air Before You Go. Cheap Charlie appears every Monday on this site. E-mail him at leocha@aol.com or access his Web site.