We all had to start taking off our shoes after the Richard Reid shoe bomber. Twenty plus years later we are still reacting to a terrifying attack with an ordinary object that didn’t even work.
And we are still bottlenecking hundreds of people in a crowd BEFORE the checkpoint and it won’t be until someone attacks there will we ever actually do anything about it
It has never been about preventing anything. It was about the appearance of doing something.
9.11 was of course tragic, but that problem was solved by locking the cockpit door. And yes, no-one wants to be on a plane with an explosive device, but those are really rare. Not least because that same device is easier to use, with more effective results, in pretty much anywhere else.
And after all that money spent, it's unclear that the TSA would actually prevent any serious attack.
Outside the US things tend to be a lot more relaxed. (So much so that special checkpoints are arranged for flights to and from the US to conform to US requirements.)
Which caused its own problems, which were resolved by always having at least two pilots in the cockpit at the same time.
Everytime I go through that charade, I roll my eye at everything they do since it is so obviously useless and unnecessary. The worst thing is, apparently, some people really believe in it.
Do you have a source for that?
I have performed the training in non-English, not sure I can quote it from somewhere online unfortunately. It is internal training material.
Second, I also doubt people waiting in lines at the airport will be anything but rational the moment someone take out a gun and or a bomb. At least on a plane, nobody can run anywhere. In the airport check in, there will be shoving and yelling and stepping on each other to get out faster.
Also, it is harder to smuggle a rifle onto a plane. It isn't difficult to bring something extremely destructive to the check in gate.
The closed nature of the aircraft induced twice as more fear than in a crowded open area.
Also, even if we assume everyone is rational, the person holding the prohibited object is not guaranteed to be rational.
The difficulty of bringing a rifle is exactly the security check(also mocked as security theatre here), and anyone willing to risk a destructive object has zero incentive to bring it through security checks because they are discouraged by the security theatre, finally the risk is well worth in the air or blowing up something close to a massively valuable(i.e an aircraft).