Crisis seen in luggage screening

Are we safer yet?

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2006-09-19-baggage-screening_x.htm

By Thomas Frank, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — The nation's airports face a looming crisis in their ability to screen checked luggage for bombs that will require billions of dollars to avert, a new report ordered by Congress says.

Many airports have too few screeners and use slow, labor-intensive bomb detectors that are being overwhelmed by increasing passenger traffic, the study says.

The report criticizes how bomb detectors were installed in airports after 9/11. Because of a tight deadline, "many if not most of the implementations were suboptimal," it says.

The van-sized machines clog terminals and operate so slowly that flights are sometimes held up or bags don't make it onto their flights, airport officials say. Those problems will worsen unless luggage scanners are replaced at most U.S. airports with faster machines that are part of baggage-conveyor systems.

"It's very urgent," said James Bennett, CEO of the authority that runs Washington's Reagan National and Dulles airports. "It's one of the — if not the— most pressing improvement that needs to be made in aviation security."

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Why not fly luggage/cargo in a separate robotic plane? Hell half the time it ends up on the wrong plane anyway. That would lesson the motivation to use an explosive in that manner - I mean how terror inducing is it to just blow up someone's dirty underwear? Then screening can focus on carry-on and passengers. Not that it would be the entire solution but hey, every little bit eh?