Our View: Flying unfriendly, unsafe skies with TSA
Want to know how cattle feel? Visit any major airport.
The endless lines; the removal of jackets, belts, shoes, watches, lip balm and the lint from our pockets – we were told it was necessary for our safety. The profiling, the pat-downs, the full-body scanners, the screenings of kids in wheelchairs and the probing of afros. We’ve been forced to endure it all and much more.
Oh, and the expense. We can’t forget about the millions of tax dollars spent on so-called security.
What have we gotten for that expense? Apparently, for not much. An internal report leaked to ABC, shows the Transportation Security Administration is inept at its most basic function: screening. Given 70 chances to detect weapons hidden on undercover agents, TSA failed 67 times. That’s a success rate of 5 percent. Put another way, a failure rate of 95 percent.
The reaction was swift. Within days of the Homeland Security Inspector General’s report going public, acting TSA administrator Melvin Carraway was forced to resign and a U.S. Senate committee confirmed his successor, U.S. Coast Guard Vice Admiral Peter Neffenger.
Officials point out there hasn’t been a successful attack on air travel since Sept. 11, 2001. They also say changes have been made at the airports where those 67 undercover agents strolled through checkpoints. But that doesn’t do much to assuage our skepticism, especially in light of reports that the scanning devices are outrageously unreliable.
Not after reading that one undercover agent was stopped after setting off an alarm, was patted down and still allowed to board a plane with a fake bomb taped to his back.
And not when TSA’s rules for what can be carried onto airplanes differ so wildly from airport to airport.
Take pocketknives. The rules say any blade under 2.3 inches in length and less than a half-inch wide is OK. Many airports, such as San Francisco, allow passengers to carry such knives onto airplanes. But TSA staffers in other major airports refuse to allow the exact same knife to pass security – forcing travelers to either throw away their belongings or pay inflated prices to send it home.
Flying in the United States already is an expensive, cramped and miserable experience. The air gets stale, the amenities are non-existent (unless you pay even more to fly first-class) and tall travelers often exit airplanes with bruised knees or feet that have been stepped on or rolled over. Everyone is cranky and many believe recirculated air is making them sick.
Many TSA agents make it worse – not just by failing to do their jobs, but through their approach to doing them. Female passengers have been embarrassed and some male passengers were even groped, while many have missed their flights while being checked or rechecked.
It’s bad enough that airlines treat us like livestock; we don’t need to have oblivious TSA employees herding us through the ques.
This story was originally published June 11, 2015 at 2:41 PM with the headline "Our View: Flying unfriendly, unsafe skies with TSA."