What fun air travel has become. Once upon a time I really enjoyed flying. I looked forward to it. It was fun. Now I dread it. I’ll do almost anything to avoid it. This has nothing to do with danger or risk or even the airlines treating people badly, that’s been going on for years and while annoying it didn’t really ever turn me off to flying. What has finally earned that distinction is the latest and greatest roll out of “airport security”. Only a government committee comprised of people who never travel commercial airlines could have come up with the scenario that is in place in our airports. It’s a colossal time waster chuck full of human error failure points and in no way offers any real security, just tons of inconvenience and stupid restrictions.
Let’s start with check in. The once novel and easy to use e-ticket check in kiosks are now mandatory for people with e-tickets, even the ones who don’t have a clue how to use them and can’t read and follow simple directions, this seems to be about 75% of the American population. My experience with check-in at Continental Airlines at Port Columbus was made even more maddening by a problem with flights into the New Jersey area. People booked on that flight were given their own line, which is fine, but they were also given sole use of the paper ticket check in people. This meant moving all the paper ticket holders into the lines for e-tickets. So now the e-ticket holders couldn’t get to the kiosks and the baggage check in people were tied up with all the paper ticket holders. The net result was actually worse than the old system.
Next up are the new baggage scanning machines. Why oh why do these monstrosities have to be placed in an area designed to handle people? What is the reasoning that requires the owner of the bag to stay with it until it leaves the machine? Why do they take your boarding pass while your bag is scanned? I know of at least one occasion where the wrong boarding pass was handed back to the person who didn’t notice until too late. Another nice little human error point that we all have to double and triple check and that server no apparent purpose. And where is the consistency? Houston Intercontinental, sorry, George Bush Intercontinental Airport (that’s another entire rant, the naming of airports after presidents) doesn’t have these large monstrosities in the way. If they have them at all they are where they belong, behind the scenes. Scanning a bag doesn’t require the owner of the bag be present.
And finally we come to the actual people scanning process. Naturally now is the time to change the procedure everyone is used to and only remind them occasionally. We don’t need your ID as you go through, only before you enter the line. We don’t need you to put all your things in a plastic bin, only your laptops. If you have any shoe not a sneaker, stand on the white box, if it beeps take off your shoes and put them through the scanner and walk though either bare foot or in socks, through the sloppy wet mess created by the people with “safe” shoes. Of course, a cardinal rule of airport security and is to never ever ever open a second scanner if there are less than 250 people in line.
This time around my number was up and I was chosen to be screened. I got the whole 8 yards of personal scanning; I didn’t have to remove my shoes, though I did have to unbuckle my belt. And my just scanned carry on was emptied and gone through. If the machine is that bad and the person monitoring that asleep we’re in real trouble, and not just from people with pocket knives and toe nail clippers.
All told it took almost the full 2 hours to get to the gate at Port Columbus on a Thursday evening, hardly a busy travel time. Ironically, this same process at IAH took a fraction of the time. I guess in some instances bigger really is better.
At the end of all this, the logic of screening people randomly when we know who the most likely people to try and hijack a plane are becomes clear. After the process for a brief period of time I am one of those people. I may not be a member of a fundamentalist Islamic sect or be in any way Arab but by the end of this entire process if I had the means I just might blow up a plane because I’m so annoyed with it all. It would be nice release. The system is designed to push normal non threatening people to the breaking point to see if they are really evil at heart. So far I haven’t blown up a plane so I must be good.