Over the past ten years the changes in commercial air travel have been extensive, airlines have disappeared, mainline flights have been down gauged to regional jets, airline meals are hard to come by … and of course airport security has become an irritating process, with one of the top complaints being the forced removal of…
Security is a fact of life for airline travel and screening procedures vary from country to country … which leads to this reader mail from Gene R., from Pittsburgh, PA. Gene writes “I just flew home to Pittsburgh from Paris with US Airways, as I have done a few times through Philadelphia. When connecting through…
Yesterday Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano announced that children, 12 and younger, would no longer be required to remove their shoes at Transportation Security Administration (TSA) security checkpoints and be able to have their hands swabbed for explosives rather than be subject to a pat down. The TSA’s move to allow children to…
Say what you will about the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), but the agency is made up of people and those people are just like you and I. The within the TSA are parents, neighbors, someone’s brother, sister, child … and they share a common experience of where they were on September 11th 2001 and what…
Getting from the ‘land side’ to the ‘air side’ of an airport security checkpoint can be frustrating, especially for infrequent flyers. Airport security checkpoints in the US and around the world may have different designs, but the process of getting through a checkpoint with your belonging is always the same. This reader mail comes…
As NATO continues its military actions against Muammar Gadhafi’s Libyan regime, Gadhafi has threatened to carry out attacks in Europe against “homes, offices, families,” unless NATO ceases its airstrikes. Gadhafi’s unstable government has previously carried out acts of terrorism on commercial airliners, most notably Pan Am Flight 103, on the 21st of December 1988,…
As airports security screening around the world has become stricter, and new protocols are put into place, there are been an increasing uproar when it comes to the search of children. In the United States the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has repeatedly come under scrutiny when it comes to performing ‘enhanced pat downs’ on…
Texan State Representative David Simpson (R-Longview) has taken an interesting stance on the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) ‘enhanced pat downs’ and has recently introduced Texas House Bill 1937 that would make it a criminal offense for TSA Transportation Security Officers (TSO), or anyone for that matter, to touch a person’s genitals, or breasts, during a…
[EDIT FOR CORRECTION: 28-DECEMEMBER-2010 – 2:46PM EST – Original report stated Ms. Hirschkind refused the TSA AIT scanners, however AUS does not presently have AIT scanners] Last Wednesday, the 22nd of December, a disturbing news story about a woman with a pace maker, who is a rape survivor, being knocked to the ground, handcuffed, dragged…
Just in time for Christmas, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has added a new directive to its front line playbook. This morning, the 23rd of December, the TSA began mandatory explosive trace detection (ETD) on all thermoses and insulated children’s’ sippy cups. While thermoses and sippy cups must be empty when passing through an airport…
