No, seriously. Airport security is utter nonsense.

Sure, you take your shoes off and stuff. But last time I went through, I got all the way to Dulles before I realized I'd taken a freakin' lighter through security.

And wasn't stopped.

What the hey? At DIA, I saw a bucket filled with lighters in the middle of the long security line, where people had dropped them off before hitting the magic gate.

Apparently, security strategy is saying "you can't bring them." :eyes: Why didn't I think of that?

Though I did accompany my then-minor daughter to the gate on a few of her flights to see her dad.

One time, I went as bare-bones as possible. I had on a tank top, capri pants with no pockets, and canvas sneakers with no socks. I did not carry a phone or purse. The only thing in my hand was my driver's license, as I had left my keys in the little box in front of the x-ray machine.

Guess who was the one pulled out of line for a special check and a shoe removal? Yep. It was me.

:evilgrin:

Coming back from a fishing trip, I was looking for something in my carry-on bag and discovered I'd left a filet knife with a 7" blade in it. I had the bag on the boat and forgot to put the knife back in my checked baggage.
:shrug:

there's a HUGE loophole in security, which has been pretty widely published, having to do with those wonderful print-them-yourself boarding passes (I love anything that reduces the number of lines I need to stand in) I really believe that alot of the measures are window-dressing.

I don't worry, though - there are so many easier targets....

there's a HUGE loophole in security, which has been pretty widely published, having to do with those wonderful print-them-yourself boarding passes (I love anything that reduces the number of lines I need to stand in) I really believe that alot of the measures are window-dressing.

I don't worry, though - there are so many easier targets....

>I really believe that alot of the measures are window-dressing.<

The last time I flew was to Washington, DC, for JulieFest in 2002. I think I'll be staying off planes for the time being...

Julie
we had fun though, didn't we? :evilgrin:

and JulieRB. What's not to like?

although, it wasn't quite an accident...there was no way i was going to fly 8 hours and not be able to light up when i got the hell off of that plane...but, i didn't hide it, they just never looked very hard at my backpack... :shrug:

but, in Paris on the way back, they were super-vigilant about every fucking thing on earth :eyes:

Making Amerikans everywhere feel like big bother is there for you.

Last time I was on a plane was in August of last year. My wife dropped me off at the airport at 9am because she had to work that day, the TSA checkpoint didn't open until 11am, and all I had with me to read was President Clinton's memoirs.

I didn't want to read the last legally-elected president's memoirs on the ground because I read REALLY fast and I knew I needed something to do on the plane. So, I started pacing.

Every airport in America has this neat little scale model of itself sitting in a public area. You've seen them, even if you haven't actually looked at them. Anyway, I'm standing there looking at this thing thinking how sharp it is, when suddenly it hit me: this is a sand table for a terrorist.

One of the TSA people was walking around and I called her over: "This thing's got to go."
'Why's that?'
"Because it's such a faithful model of this airport, any terrorist who wants to blow the place up can use it to plan his attack."
'Oh. Well, I'll let the airport manager know.'

About ten minutes later, I'm sitting upstairs reading a newspaper and I hear "excuse me." I look up and there's the airport manager, a couple of guys from the FAA, all the TSA people who work in Fayetteville, and about nine cops. O shit. "You were saying that our airport model is a security threat." So I offered to take them downstairs and show them. They took me up on it and we went.

Assembled around the model, I start showing them how a terrorist could figure out his whole attack by just looking at this for a couple of minutes. They even had the door to the flightline broom closet on this thing! He'd know where to send people and where to put his bombs for the maximum effect.

"How did you think of this?"
'I was MI for twelve years, and we're trained to think in terms of worst-case scenarios. And four of those twelve years were spent in infantry divisions, where you see a lot of sand table exercises, and this is a real nice sand table.'

One of them asked why a terrorist would attack a "little airport like this one." Easy: it's a "little airport" but it's full of paratroopers because Fort Bragg is right on the north side of town. Any terrorist would love to kill some of them.

You could look up and see the cops--most of the police in Fayetteville are former Fort Bragg soldiers--nodding, and the poor airport manager was turning white. They picked the model up and carried it to a storage closet.

Four days later, when I got back to Fayetteville, the model was back on display...but someone had scraped the doors off the back side of the terminal building and painted the area under the overhang black.

Lots of airports have something like that.

Back when the government actually funded infrastructure--sometime in the 1960s--they used a big public works bill to rebuild damn near every airport in America. They needed to; when most airports were built, they were designed to handle the C-47s and DC-3s that the airlines bought from the Army Air Corps.

Then came the jets, and an airport set up to take DC-3 traffic is NOT going to be suitable for 707 traffic, much less 747s, Airbuses, L-1011s, DC-10s...

So the government sank MASSIVE amounts of money into converting all the prop-job airports to jet airports, and each one required a scale model of the project so the money men could see what their cash was buying. At the dedication of the "new" airport, the city's airport commission received the model and put it in a place of honor in the terminal building.

No security hassles at all.
:P

Try flying INto the United States and witness the crap that the U.S. is forcing other nations to do. It makes it even more obvious what a gulag this nation has become.

Mr. Laurel and I just got back from a honeymoon in New Zealand. There, airport security was remarkably sane. Security officers were polite and respectful and obviously well-trained. There weren't the stupid announcements every 10 seconds about "For your safety, please don't accept any luggage, bags of heroin, or explosives from people you do not know." People with semiautomatics did not walk through the airport halls.

But leaving the country, people on America-bound flights must go through a second security checkpoint just before the two gates that are allocated to flights to the U.S. We were siphoned into a relatively small gate area with two toilets, no shops, and no water fountains. The two gates, though next to one another, are separated by Plexiglas. By the time boarding began, the area was so packed with people that people had to stand between the rows of seats. Since we were the only ones subject to this treatment, I can only assume this is something that DHS now requires of foreign carriers.

Clip you nails to the cuticle!

Probably the use of actual cops has something to do with it.

One of the area courthouses prohibits cell phones with cameras (why, I have no idea). I inadvertantly had one in my briefcase. The person operating the baggage scannner actually spotted the cell phone.