Cockpit Confidential (29 page)

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will point out how the privileges granted to tarmac workers are contingent upon fingerprinting, a ten-year criminal background investigation, and crosschecking against terror watch lists and that ground employees are additionally subject to random physical checks. All right, but the background checks for pilots are no less thorough. And as for those random spot checks, one apron worker told me that he hadn't been stopped or patted down in over three years. “All I need is my ID, which I swipe through a turnstile. The only TSA presence we notice is when the blue-shirts come down to the cafeteria to get food.”

Here's a true story:

I'm at the TSA checkpoint at a major U.S. airport. I'm on duty, in my full uniform, and have all of my gear with me. I hoist my luggage onto the x-ray belt, then pass through the metal detector. Once on the other side, I'm waiting for my stuff to reappear when the belt suddenly groans to a stop.

“Bag check!” shouts the guard behind the monitor. Two of the most exasperating words in air travel, those are.

The bag in question turns out to be my roll-aboard. The guard has spotted something inside. The seconds tick by as she waits to confer with her colleague. One minute passes. Then two. Then three. All the while, the line behind me grows longer.

“Bag check!”

At last, another guard ambles over. There's a conference. For some reason, these situations require a sort of football huddle, with lots of whispering and pointing, before the belt can be switched on again. Why an offending piece of luggage can't simply be pulled from the machine and screened separately is a topic for another time, but let us ponder, for a moment, how much time is wasted each day by these checks.

Finally the second guard, the intensity of whose scowl is exceeded only by the weight of the chip on her shoulder, lifts my roll-aboard from the machine and walks toward me. “Is this yours?” she wants to know.

“Yes, it's mine.”

“You got a knife in here?”

“A knife?”

“A knife,” she barks. “Some silverware?”

Yes, I do. I always do. Inside my suitcase I carry a spare set of airline-sized cutlery—a spoon, a fork, and a knife. Along with packets of noodles and small snacks, this is part of my hotel survival kit, useful in the event of short layovers when food isn't available. It's identical to the cutlery that accompanies your meal on a long-haul flight. The pieces are stainless steel and about five inches long. The knife has a rounded end and a short row of teeth—I would call them serrations, but that's too strong a word. For all intents and purposes, it's a miniature butter knife.

“Yes,” I tell the guard. “There's a metal knife in there—a butter knife.”

She opens the compartment and takes out a small vinyl case containing the three pieces. After removing the knife, she holds it upward between with two fingers and stares at me coldly. Her pose is like that of an angry schoolteacher about to berate a child for bringing chewing gum to class.

“You ain't taking this through,” she says. “No knifes [
sic
]. You can't bring a knife through here.”

It takes a moment for me to realize that she's serious. “I'm… but…it's…”

She throws it into a bin and starts to walk away.

“Wait a minute,” I say. “That's airline silverware.”

“Doesn't matter what it is. You can't bring knifes [
sic
] through here.”

“Ma'am, that's an airline knife. It's the knife they give you on the plane.”

“Have a good afternoon, sir.”

“You can't be serious,” I say.

With that, she grabs the knife out of the bin and walks over to one of her colleagues seated at the end of the checkpoint in a folding chair. I follow her over.

“This guy wants to bring this through.”

The man in the chair looks up lazily. “Is it serrated?”

She hands it to him. He looks at it quickly, then addresses me.

“No, this is no good. You can't take this.”

“Why not?”

“It's serrated.” He is talking about the little row of teeth along the edge. Truth be told, the knife in question, which I've had for years, is actually smaller and duller than most of the knives handed out by airlines to their first and business class customers. You'd be hard pressed to cut a slice of toast with it.

“Oh, come on.”

“What do you call these?” He runs his finger along the minuscule serrations.

“Those… but… they… it…”

“No serrated knives. You can't take this.”

“But, sir, how can it not be allowed when it's the same knife they
give you on the plane
?”

“Those are the rules.”

“That's impossible. Can I please speak to a supervisor?”

“I am the supervisor.”

There are those moments in life when time stands still and the air around you seems to solidify. You stand there in an amber of absurdity, waiting for the crowd to burst out laughing and the
Candid Camera
guy to appear from around the corner.

Except the supervisor is dead serious.

Realizing that I'm not getting my knife back, I try for the consolation prize, which is getting the man to admit that, if nothing else, the rule makes no sense. “Come on,” I argue. “The purpose of confiscating knives is to keep people from bringing them onto planes, right? But the passengers are
given
these knives with their meals. At least admit that it's a dumb rule.”

“It's not a dumb rule.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it isn't.”

And so on, until he asks me to leave.

This was wrong on so many levels that it's hard to keep them straight. Just for starters, do I really need to point out that an airline pilot at the controls of his plane would hardly need a butter knife if he desired to inflict damage?

I know this comes across as a self-serving complaint, but at heart this isn't about pilots. It's about how diseased our approach to security is overall. Like most airline crewmembers, I'd have no problem going through screening if it were done fairly, logically, and rationally. In a way, TSA is going about this backward. They're working to come up with a system that exempts pilots, when what they ought to be doing is improving the rules for
everybody
.

Thousands of travelers, meanwhile, have their own versions of stories like mine: the girl who had her purse confiscated because it was embroidered with beads in the shape of a handgun; the woman whose cupcake was taken away; the pilot in San Francisco whose infant daughter's baby rattle was taken because it had liquid inside. And this gets me thinking. Why can't TSA exhibit common sense now and then? If we're to believe that TSA screeners are well-trained professionals, as the agency maintains, why can they not handle the responsibility of an occasional judgment call? Why can't they be
empowered
to allow some on-the-spot decision-making? If a screener is shown a 6-ounce tube of toothpaste that is obviously only half full, does it really need to be taken and flipped into the waste bin, as currently happens 90 percent of the time?

“Our screeners are allowed to exercise leeway in some cases,” a TSA spokesperson told me. “They have the training, and the obligation, to exercise discretion.” Maybe, but I'm not seeing much leeway and discretion. I'm seeing a draconian obsession with the exactness of container volumes and the dimensions of objects, up to and including whether a pilot's tiny knife has serrations on its blade, as if they alone could be the difference between unsafe and safe. Enforcement of this kind transcends mere tedium and becomes downright unsafe. Maybe you've heard the story about a test in which TSA screeners are presented with a suitcase containing a mock explosive device with a water bottle nestled next to it? They ferret out the water, of course, while the bomb goes sailing through.

Notice too the uniforms adopted by TSA. Screeners are now called “officers,” and they wear blue shirts and silver badges. Not by accident, the shirts and badges look exactly like the kind worn by police. Mission-creep, this is called. In fact, TSA workers do not hold law enforcement power as such—much as they have done a good job of fooling people into believing otherwise. TSA holds the authority, legitimately, to inspect your belongings and prevent you from passing through a checkpoint. It does
not
have the authority to detain you, interrogate you, arrest you, force you to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or otherwise compromise your rights. Both TSA and the traveling public need to remember this.

In 2010, following the failed bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, things were taken to the next level with the introduction of full-body scanners. This has been one of the more controversial—and disheartening—developments in our long war on the abstract noun called terrorism. The first-generation machines, the scanned images which left little to the imagination, are being replaced by those showing only a generic contour of the body. While this somewhat settles the privacy debate, it doesn't solve their tactical shortcomings.

The scanners have been promoted as a key component of airport security, yet some airports have them while others don't. There's a scanner at one checkpoint, but no scanner at the one right next to it; scanners at some terminals, but not at others. Are terrorists that stupid? And if somebody is going to attempt to sneak a bomb through a checkpoint, it is much more likely to happen someplace in Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Middle East than it is in Peoria, Wichita, or Cleveland. But domestically is where most of the machines have been installed; overseas, they are rare.

It's easy to be cynical. Was development of the body scanner really in the interest of keeping passengers safe, or was it for the interests of the corporations who stand to make billions in their design and deployment? It's questionable whether they're making us safer, but rest assured they're making somebody wealthy. But here it has come to pass, and our reaction, aside from one or two muffled complaints, has been a sheeplike acquiescence.

No less frustrating is the strained notion that, beginning with the events of September 11, air travel suddenly entered a new age of danger and threat. The grandiosity of the 2001 attacks, with their Hollywood thriller plotline and operatic fireballs, has gummed up our memories. We talk of the “post-9/11 era,” whereas politically motivated violence against civil aviation has been with us for decades. In fact, we see it a lot less often than we used to. The 1970s through the 1990s were a sort of Golden Age of Air Crimes, rife with hijackings and bombings. In the five-year span between 1985 and 1989, there were no fewer than six major terrorist attacks against commercial planes or airports, including the Libyan-sponsored bombings of Pan Am 103 and UTA 772; the bombing of an Air India 747 that killed 329 people; and the saga of TWA flight 847. Flight 847, headed from Athens to Rome in June 1985, was hijacked by Shiite militiamen armed with grenades and pistols. The purloined 727 then embarked on a remarkable, seventeen-day odyssey to Lebanon, Algeria, and back again. At one point passengers were removed, split into groups, and held captive in downtown Beirut. The photograph of TWA Captain John Testrake, his head out the cockpit window, collared by a gun-wielding terrorist, was broadcast worldwide and became an unforgettable icon of the siege.

I say “unforgettable,” but that's just the thing. How many Americans remember flight 847? It's astonishing how short our memories are. And partly because they're so short, we are easily frightened and manipulated. Imagine TWA 847 happening tomorrow. Imagine six successful terror attacks against planes in a five-year span. The airline industry would be decimated, the populace frozen in fear. It would be a catastrophe of epic proportion—of wall-to-wall coverage and, dare I suggest, the summary surrender of important civil liberties. What is it about us, as a society, that has made us so unable to remember and unable to cope?

But all right, enough of what we shouldn't be doing. What about things we
should
be doing? If I'm going to spend all this time complaining, it's only fair that I offer up some solutions, no?

Well, airport security overall ought to be scaled back into a leaner but more focused operation. I wouldn't say that we have too much security, necessarily, but we certainly have too much in the wrong places, out of synch with the hierarchy of threat. First up, every dime currently being spent looking for pointy objects, double-checking people's IDs, and confiscating innocuous liquids needs to be reallocated.

The primary threat to commercial aviation is, was, and shall remain bombs. Therefore, every piece of luggage, both checked and carry-on, as well as cargo, ought to be scrutinized for explosives. This already happens, officially, though I reckon we could be doing a more thorough job of it, with a stronger emphasis on airports outside the United States. The likeliest point of entry for a bomb is not Omaha or Tucson, and I'd suggest shifting a good 35 percent of TSA resources to locations overseas. If that should require some touchy negotiations with foreign airport authorities, so be it.

And like it or not, the time has come to put greater emphasis on passenger profiling. Profiling is a dirty word to some, but it needn't be a one-dimensional preoccupation with skin color or national origin. Indeed, as security specialists will tell you, racial or ethnic profiling doesn't work. Routine is weakness, and the more predictable our methods, the easier they are to foil. Effective profiling uses a multipoint approach that takes in a wide range of characteristics, both tangible and behavioral. TSA has been training staff in the finer points of behavioral pattern recognition. That's good, though for the time being, screeners are a lot more adept at picking out scissors and shampoo bottles than picking out terrorists.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has proposed a plan in which passengers would be categorized into one of three risk groups and then screened accordingly. Biometric proof of identity, such as a fingerprint or encoded passport, will be checked against a stored profile containing various personal data and against watch lists. This, together with flight booking data, will determine which of three lines a traveler is assigned to. Those in the first line would receive little more than a cursory bag check. Those in the second line get a slightly closer look, while those in the third would face an enhanced inspection similar to the current TSA procedures. This wouldn't be perfect—and like many people, I get a little nervous when I hear the words “biometric” and “profile containing various personal data”—but it's maybe the best idea yet when it comes to restoring sanity to airport security. IATA says that an early version of the three-tiered system could be up and running in under three years.