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Where's the Bomb?
Err Travel · April 25, 2000

Maybe America West flight attendants were a little gun shy after their employer found itself in hot water with the National Association of Arab Americans over an incident last November.

Back then the airline hauled a couple of Saudi Arabian students off a flight bound for Washington because they were acting suspicious. (More on this in an upcoming Err Travel column.)

Apparently the "suspicious" are now given favorable treatment on America West. At least that was my experience recently on a flight from Baltimore to Phoenix.

After we had boarded the airplane and the door had been closed and the jetway removed, there was a commotion in the rearward part of the passenger compartment.

A distraught seventeenish-year-old girl was brought forward for a conversation with a flight attendant right next to where I was sitting. The girl was saying something about her father like not making the flight, and she didn't want to, like, leave without him. She insisted on like totally getting off the plane.

The airline accommodated her.

The jetway was brought back, the airplane door opened, the girl allowed off, the door closed, and the jetway removed again. But then as the airplane was ready for push-back, some guy (okay, me) insisted on knowing if the girl had checked any luggage and if she had, had it been removed.

The flight attendant told me that the girl said that she had not checked any luggage so there was no reason for any further delay.

"Wait I minute," I said. "She said that she hadn't checked any luggage, but did you check?" "Yes, it's okay. She didn't have any luggage."

I had overheard the entire discussion between the girl and the flight attendant. Unless there were some secret signals exchanged between the two of them, the flight attendant had no more information than I.

So I asked again.

"How do you know she didn't check any luggage?"

At this point, I got the "One moment, please" from the attendant as he moved to the front of the plane, and I got the evil eye from my fellow passengers.

One passenger even asked me, "Did she look like a terrorist?"

It was getting a little tense with me coming off as a paranoid nincompoop until I used a sentence combining the magic words "Pan Am" and "Lockerbie".

Now what appeared to be my obduracy seemed a lot more reasonable to my compatriots. I now had allies.

I also had the Feds on my side. The FAA has a program called Computer Assisted Passenger Screening (CAPS) which selects a few bags to be scanned with explosives detection devices or identifies particular bags so that they won't fly unless their owners are on the same flights.

This bag-matching requirement isn't perfect, but is seems to be an adequate compromise between gridlock security and on-time performance. And it does offer some margin of security against airplane bombers.

So after further inquires from me and my newfound teammates, discussions with the captain, and calls to the gate agent, which might not have otherwise been made except for our insistence, we felt more comfortable about our pending departure.

True, we didn't know for sure whether or not the girl had any checked luggage on the flight with us. She may well have. But if she did, it had not been marked by the CAPS system.

And by the fact that you are reading this column, you know that I arrived safely with yet another story about how we are ultimately responsible for your own security when we travel.

Next week I get a chance to live those words all over again: another airplane ride.

Dr. Terry Riley is a psychologist and travel security authority. His column appears on Wednesdays. He is author of the popular book Travel Can Be Murder. Visit his site at http://www.appliedpsychology.com or e-mail him at terry@ticked.com.