I walk up to the security checkpoint checkpoint, where I show the agent my phone. They see my boarding pass with the green checkmark and send me to the empty TSA Pre line.

I walk through the metal detector with no adjustments to my attire.

I am at the gate in 5 minutes.

I like how trains basically let you show up last minute, and a 3 hour train ride actually means a 3 hour train ride, compared to airport, checkpoints and boarding time, possibly waiting on the runway, and air time.

But you really just need to upgrade your travel accommodations to make your airport experience more seamless.

That costs money. Many people take the train or a shuttle or lean on a friend.

>I walk up to the security checkpoint checkpoint, where I show the agent my phone. They see my boarding pass with the green checkmark and send me to the empty TSA Pre line. I walk through the metal detector with no adjustments to my attire.

You paid for that TSA PreCheck privilege which, while not in the grand scheme a large amount, is technically something.

It's also beside the point. TSA PreCheck is the result of a careful plan:

1. Make everyone undergo an intrusive, invasive, and time-consuming process that provides little to no additional security.

2. Allow people to pay for the privilege of not going through that procedure.

3. Profit!

I don't do PreCheck because buying your rights is not something we should be able or have to do. It's a perversion that leaves us happy to pay for something that was commonplace until 9/10/01.

The standard answer is that airplane travel, just as being able to drive on public roads is not a right. Founding fathers apparently failed in their inability to predict we'd be able to amazingly fly through the air one day. So it is not in the Constitution. Therefore please step right into the Rapeyscan machine if you want to make it to your job interview, or to see your family across country.

It seems to claim a right to travel unimpeded you'd have to walk, on public land, or ride a horse or bicycle. Basically what you might have done 200 years ago.

I think a traditional interpretation of the constitution is that unenumerated rights are reserved for the people, so this shouldn't be an issue, as designed. In reality, we can't even seem to maintain the rights that are explicitly reserved for the people (cough4th amendmentcough).

The Department of Homeland Security (of which the TSA is a part of) has a budget and its priorities are set in Congress. There is no "profit" motive here.

The US is throwing money at this problem, and money that only creates inconveniences for us.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Chertoff

I also consider my time to be more valuable.

Trains have their delays, too, such as long waits on passing sidings to clear the way for freight trains. Much of Amtrak's routes (72% by mileage) are on freight company owned rails that Amtrak pays for access to.

The freight companies gives their own trains priority over Amtrak. They are supposed to give Amtrak priority, but there is little effort spend on enforcement.

49 USC 24308 (c) says:

"Preference Over Freight Transportation. - Except in an emergency, intercity and commuter rail passenger transportation provided by or for Amtrak has preference over freight transportation in using a rail line, junction, or crossing unless the Board orders otherwise under this subsection. A rail carrier affected by this subsection may apply to the Board for relief. If the Board, after an opportunity for a hearing under section 553 of title 5, decides that preference for intercity and commuter rail passenger transportation materially will lessen the quality of freight transportation provided to shippers, the Board shall establish the rights of the carrier and Amtrak on reasonable terms."

Although on my last flight I did learn that Nutella is a liquid. Maybe I should have frozen it?

Heathrow's FAQ: "Do I need to remove my shoes at security? Only if you’re asked. Some passengers will be asked to remove shoes in order for them to be x-rayed."

Gatwick's FAQ: "You may be asked to remove your shoes and belt before going through the security archway."

Of course they'd just change their already-arbitrary rules and force us all through the X-ray machines anyway, if we started refusing to use them en masse; but that'd create its own kind of legal push-back, and hopefully something good would come of the resulting mess. In any case, I'm not putting up with their nonsense while there is some means left I can use to resist it.

And I always fly in a kilt, regimental-style. TSA training has improved over the years, but the handful of times I managed to utterly flummox a TSA screener, suddenly confronted with a man wearing a "skirt," went a long way toward making me feel better about the humiliation of the whole exercise.

I don't blame you for paying that fee, but doesn't that just feed the monster?

Besides, "anti-TSA" is painting with too broad a brush. Air Marshals are part of the TSA, as are a myriad of other useful agencies.

Its really just the pre-screen and invasive checks that need to stop. I think we all can agree that a dedicated force of Air Marshals is a good idea, right? As is the "intelligence" unit who is looking for active threats vs Airports.

On top of that, I've seen a number of recent reports from people who said that the Precheck lanes were randomly shut down at peak travel times, forcing Precheck members to get stuck in the regular lines with everybody else. Others report that large numbers of non-Precheck people are getting randomly sent through that lane, dramatically slowing things down and causing wait times of 30-60+ minutes.

Precheck is great, but even those of us who have a relatively privileged flying experience need to stay involved and aware about the monster that is the TSA.

edit: deleted a word

Silly Me.

The first and most obvious response is that tsa-pre requires your fingerprints, and tsa does not. That obviously leads to an amount of pre-vetting that is never capable of being done in tsa.

In addition to this, I'd compare tsa to a blacklist and tsa-pre to a whitelist. Perhaps if your estranged ex-wife's crazy uncle goes to the same bar as a known terrorist suspect then tsa would prefer you go through the additional screening (and thus deny you to tsa-pre). However, the connection to the uncle is only made once you apply to tsa-pre (as its a whitelist), and thus more vetting is done.

Most airlines provide the same digital boarding passes, I often travel with my pass added to Apple Wallet.

> If an alternative airport wanted to do things a little different, such as "fly at your own risk" "no lifeguard on duty", aka no TSA b.s., I'd happily take the "at your own risk" option rather than the TSA controlled situation we're subjected to currently.

The problem here is that it's not just "your own risk" if that plane is directed at a populated area.

It's a crap comparison, anyway - the TSA is better at finding toys than they are at finding bombs and weapons. Dogs and x-ray detectors could do just as well, and "alternative airports" could choose to have those.

This. We live in a different world now. I find it very difficult to imagine a plane full of people not standing up together to take down a threat.

The wait times and hassle increase until its easier just to drive so people fly less, reducing wait time, allowing the TSA to do even less brining wait times back up...

The whole system balances at some convergence point. A really sucky convergence point.

> there's other evidence that 9/11 led to an increase in driving, which cost at least a thousand lives

... that airport and flights emanating from it would be perfectly safe! Why? Because, like everyone, terrorists, too, would love this airport so much, they wouldn't want to do anything to prevent it from operating.

This was solved when they locked the cockpit doors. Every other airport security restriction has been an overreaction in my opinion.

Flight 11 was crashed 30 minutes after hijacking, 175 20 minutes, 77 about 45 minutes, and 93 about 35 minutes later. Even if you tighten the loop between a hijacking and getting a fighter jet in the air to counter it, it will still take you about 15 minutes at best to do it.

Then you're left with the problem of figuring out which one of the contacts on your military radar doesn't have a transponder. Go to a map like <https://flightaware.com/live/> and observe the Ohio/Pennsylvania airspace in the middle of the day. You have 15 minutes to figure out the hijacked flight, guess its flight path, and then order fighters to intercept it and shoot it down.

Quite frankly, if a plane gets hijacked in the Northeast, there is no way you can get a military jet to shoot it down in time.

Destroying an aircraft over potentially populated areas can be useful to shift who and how many people are at risk when it hits the ground, but its not really (even if you can reliably destroy it when you need to, which -- absent a highly-reliable remote destruct device built into the plane [0], is hard to guarantee) a great way to "protect those on the ground". Because the wreckage is going to hit somewhere, and you don't really have precision control of that.

[0] which raises its own problems, of course

Really, though, that was more of a glib remark. The more salient point IMO is the fact that the military is far from guaranteed to succeed in bringing down a hijacked airliner before it hits its target, or without killing other people on the ground.

Besides, since 911 the doors of plane cockpits are almost like a bank vault.

:(

And if you could afford it, they called you part of "the jet set." I bet this - where more people can use air travel - is better. It's just not special any more. UX is a secondary consideration.

There aren't enough people ready and willing to take that risk to make it a competitive business model for airlines. They are a business that only works at massive scale due to extreme competition on price.

Not that I'm a fan of the TSA by any stretch, but that's a pretty grievous misunderstanding of the root issue.

Holding the "pleebs" to a higher standard than the rich is unconscionable IMO.

2. Money buys you things. By definition people with more money will not be burdened by the same things as those with less.

The commons are a superset of things provisioned by government, and we expect that the commons will be relatively unburdened and available equally to rich and poor.

Being unburdened by hunger and stress about paying rent is one thing; being unburdened by preferential treatment by the state is another.

Rate for a Gulfstream jet was about $2500 per hour.

So, "for the rich".

I think we're upper-middle-class-ish, but there's no way we could justify chartering a jet for a family vacation if it costs as much as a car (a smaller jet might "only" be around $12,000 for the same trip AFAICT).

Can a Cessna 172 take me and my wife and child across the country to New York? Is parking a plane there free?

"Especially as a hobby" has nothing to do with what we're talking about here. Horseback riding is also affordable as a hobby, but nobody's bringing it up in a thread about the TSA because it has just as much relevance.

Can a Cessna 172 get you to New York? Sure, if you have the time. It'll be a long and monotonous flight though.

Now, with all of that said, your point still stands. GA flying is a hobby and almost always more expensive than hopping on an airline.

You can drive at 70MPH. Windspeed doesn't impact you. The Cesna will cruise at ~140MPH. Windspeed might delay your arrival to the point that it's much faster to drive for shorter trips though. The jet will do 530MPH.

Maybe the Cesna makes sense if there's no reasonably direct route by freeway. Or you're island hopping. It seems like a fairly small window where chartering a Cesna makes sense though (IMO). You can't transport a family of 4 with luggage. It'll be more expensive than the (commercial, not private) Jet, and take about 4 times longer. For every 1-1/2 hours of Jet travel, you'll have to refuel the Cesna as well. And if you though economy class on a commercial Jet was uncomfortable you're in for a rude awakening as well. ;-)

Right. Like, laws and shit.

I'm not sure what's unreasonable about the comparison. If the TSA were actually necessary, it would seem like a huge gap in security to allow just anyone with the cash to charter a few private jets around the country.

I'm not calling the comparison unreasonable, I'm simply saying that the two are not the same, so it's perfectly reasonable for the security to be different too.