A Summer from Hell Is Coming to U.S. Airports

Hell even at LAX it varies based on the terminal.

Pretty sure the worst TSA award goes to MCO though. I dread flying through there, even with pre.

We had brunch at a local diner that is co-located at a small airport. A helicopter took off next to our car as we arrived, and the back door of the diner opened to the tarmac. The security amounts to not allowing small kids to be seated near the back door. It was so refreshing to see that kind of chill and pragmatic atmosphere.

They represent culture and relational attitudes of the general population in the airport areas.

Wait, does Global Entry give priority with domestic flights? I’ve only seen signs for global entry at immigration. Not at security.

I had a similar experience recently. Looking at a family road trip from SF Bay to Eugene - for four people, it's a 6 hour drive, a $900, 14+ hour train ride (overnight without beds), or a 2 hour, $800 flight.

The technical term is “porno scanner”, https://duckduckgo.com/?q=TSA+porno+scanner

Hard to say how much tourism there would be in a more sane security and immigration environment.

Because is it really that terrible? Yeah airport security is a bit annoying and maybe you get sternly told to do something. So what?

The comments here make it sound like the TSA is committing war crimes or something.

I think it's dumb, I think it's a waste of time, I think it's ineffective.

I also think that most of the time, most people spend 5-40 minutes in line, get through it, and promptly forget about it. Expecting it to affect tourism to the US seems totally absurd to me.

It certainly is on my list as a negative if the opportunity to holiday in the US comes up.

There are plenty of other places that are higher on my destination list, so it's unlikely to factor in any decision.

Because the US isn't the only country doing this.

from a 2001 low, it seems to have been on a steady upward trend to 2015, and has been flat to down since then.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/tourist-arrivals

How do you feel about the idea that the 9/11 terror attacks are virtual impossible in a post-9/11 world?

Remember that pre-9/11, plane hijackings meant you would get landed and then used as a bargaining chip for a ransom. So, now passengers know a hijacking attempt is a fight for their life (whereas before the recommended advice was to sit tight and let the hijackers do their thing).

Also, now, cockpit doors are reinforced and pilots won't open them for hijackers, no matter the cost.

Seems to be what they used to do prior to deregulation and to a lesser extent in the 90s/2000s. Every flight being full is a more recent phenomena and they are getting better at it over time [1]. When flights aren't full you can pull a plane out of its normal route and fly those passengers on the later one.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/todayinthesky/...

Rand Paul has been talking about this for years.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/post/rand-paul-...

It’s the agency. They make arbitrary rules and then they enforce different arbitrary rules. You can fly with the same luggage 100 times and get a different item banned every time.

For example, sometimes ice is ok, sometimes not. It’s supposed to always be ok, but even if you quote the rules ack at them, they pull out the “final determinations are at the discretion of the supervisor”. Which means you can never count on getting your stuff through.

Also they are terrible at their job (they fail over 90% of their tests) and they spend a ton of money. And all those new scanners they bought just happened to be made by a friend of George Bush.

Did you take your jacket, shoes, and belt off, and dump out your drinks, while waiting in line for an hour while getting yelled at for not following the ever changing instructions?

Airport security in the US used to be privately contracted until 9/11. In the aftermath, TSA security replaced the private security at all but a handful of airports, and simultaneously tightened screening procedures. Over subsequent years, the airport security experience got significantly worse in terms of longer lines, privacy invasion, and more burdensome screening (although these changed at different time and in lumpy ways). Because of this history and the lack of alternatives, it's hard to tell how much of this is because the agency is dysfunctional and how much is an unavoidable aspect of increased security standards which are pretty widely supported by the general public (but not HN).

Pre 911 airport security was privately run and in the wake of the attacks it was taken over by the Federal government.

I believe that although new security measures were felt to be necessary in light of the awareness of how much damage a hijacked plane can cause, the change to management by a federal agency with no real incentive to make things move quickly, or to even demonstrate that precautions are reasonable, wasn’t as successful as we might have hoped.

It is odd, for example, how they screen pilots ... who are obviously already in a position to do the thing we are most avidly trying to prevent ... this causes many people to feel this is all “security theater” that may create a deterrent effect through psychology but may not be doing much to prevent future attacks.

Also the TSA employees don’t seem to fear for their jobs much ... which would be consistent with many other government employees ... so they are occasionally quite rude, although many are friendly and professional.

Obviously the airlines are perfectly positioned to have motivation both to speed boarding and reduce risk of damage to people and equipment. It’s plausible that if they were in charge of security, and had to answer to insurance e companies who also assess risk, we would end up with a far better implementation.

The biggest problem is the rank inefficiency of the TSA. I don't think I've flown in the years since 9/11 where I didn't have to wait in line to get into the terminal, with everyone funneled through one or two scanner lines, while there are a dozen TSA employees lounging around doing nothing, and four or five additional lines that could be used sitting idle and unused.

Throw in some stupid, arbitrary, and unpredictably enforced rules, and hassling about taking off your shoes, belt, unpacking all your luggage, dumping out your ziplock baggy of minuscule volumes of toothpaste and shampoo, confiscating your fingernail clippers, and all the other indignities that are forced on you by petty tyrant mall-cop types.

Here are some reasons off the top of my head:

1. Security Theatre: if the goal is security, you shouldn't be able to pay to receive less scrutiny (the baddies aren't poor). I realize TSA aren't the only guilty party here, but they are able to inflict more suffering than most.

2. Nonsensical Rules, like how they treat nail clippers and water as threats to national security, and after the shoe bomber everyone has to take off their shoes, but after the underwear bomber we… still keep our underwear on? Laptops out but a pile of tablets can stay in the bag? "Randomly" selecting elders and children for enhanced screening?

3. Lacking accountability: as stated in sibling comments, the agency has little incentive to do their job efficiently, and with usually only one local airport, people have few alternative methods of travel.

4. Ineffectiveness: lots of normal people have unwittingly snuck banned items through security checkpoints. And as has been much publicized, pen test teams have managed to make fools of the checkpoints many times. And it's not like all those fancy scanner machines and employees are cheap.

So at significant cost to the US taxpayer, TSA checkpoints slow, inconvenience, annoy, and degrade travelers while providing little actual security, only the theatrics of such. We would be safer without them.

Yes... To both. TSA and dhs don't do anything. The process has gotten worse, although it is similar to other countries. It is so a farce. It doesn't catch criminals, most policies are reactionary. Three are other ways to stop hijackers than to essentially great everyone as criminals.

I don’t think it’s the workers that are the problem. If some executive at coke changes the formula and it sucks now, it’s not the delivery guys fault. They’re just doing what they get paid to do.

I hear you. You can opt out of all of it (so far). Checkpoint body scanner opts out to a full body pat-down (which takes maybe 5-10 extra minutes, but not that bad). This new facial recognition boarding system airlines are rolling out can be opted out of. That should be it in terms of biometrics needed to fly. Unless you include some countries' customs, which collect face photos or fingerprints or vials of blood——those you can't dodge without diplomatic privilege or a private jet.

I do suggest disabling javascript globally and enabling it for certain sites.

It's certainly a setting in Chrome on Android.