Are European airports statistically less secure than American airports? Is anyone even monitoring this? Surely by now we'd have some data to decide whether you need to remove your shoes or not.
They do, just kind of “at random”. I had it sometimes a bit of everywhere in Europe.
The security agents took it out, unfolded the knife blade, discussed it a bit in German and handed it back to me.
"It's OK! It's just a little guy! Go ahead".
So it depends I guess.
We were late for a flight in the Philippines and the gate agent knew it. Told me all of my travel fishing gear was contraband - even the rod and reel. Straight up stole all my fishing gear figuring (correctly) it was worth less to me than making my flight.
So after throwing away perfectly good food and multiple bottles of water because our flight was coming up, we then had to sit in a terminal that only had 2 snack choices and no real food offerings.
I've decided to never fly out of Dublin to the US again. Even if that means I have to fly to London just to transfer to the US.
I always fold up my pant legs so they can see I have low shoes and then it's no issue.
Why have a "security measure" only to allow bypassing it?
The answer is probably racism. Not everyone is allowed a pre-approval and the reasons for denial are of course obtuse.
Except it's not gated by the tiny fee, but with the background check. Only those who are statistically very low risk will be approved (which indeed is most people -- by design).
> The answer is probably racism. Not everyone is allowed a pre-approval
Is it racist to know the fact that say, zero schoolteachers from Iowa with no history of travel to the Middle East have ever hijacked a plane, but quite a few people from Saudi Arabia and Iran, or who have contacts there, have? And to allow the teacher to bypass the whole mess? I'd say that's efficient.
The fee is quite obviously not material to anyone who can afford air travel anyway. It would be a more serious critique if the fee were say, $1,500 a year. But for a hundred bucks every few years, this is neither extortion, nor a burden. It's just paying the admin costs of the program, which means not using general fund money (everyone's taxes) to pay for background checks for rich business travelers. That's progressive.
And the alternative to this type of program would be the silliness where some random grandma or child gets invasively searched because "we have to be random."
Iowans have committed significantly more homicides per capita than people from most European countries (or Saudi Arabia, for that matter). I don't think it's problematic if European airports screen Iowans more heavily than Europeans and Saudis. Do you?
If you really believe the public is kept safe most effectively by pretending to be fully blind to nationality when choosing who to screen at an airport (since you can't intensively screen everyone) I don't know what to tell you.
Although it's interesting that the same people who would take that position seem to also argue that colorblindness is actually a sin if it's done while processing a college application.
Reputation?
Are we deciding security policies by reputation or statistics?
I think I'd win the bet of "Americans have killed more people (per capita) in other countries than Saudis have", so it does seem relevant to be more wary of them. Especially given how widespread the former has been, compared to a few incidents with the latter.
> If you really believe ... I don't know what to tell you.
That does seem evident, yes.
> Although it's interesting that the same people who would take that position seem to also argue that colorblindness is actually a sin if it's done while processing a college application.
Citation?
That is true only if you start the count in 1946 or later!
The fee is tiny compared to the costs of a plane ticket. It's $100 for multiple years of validity.
The cost to do security checks on people scales with the number of people. There are plenty of taxes and fees already included with plane tickets; whatever "security fee" is actually necessary to fund reasonable security can be tacked onto the cost of tickets that way, and will automatically charge more from people flying more often (and won't penalize people who don't fly at all).
The only possible economic benefits separating it out into an optional multi-year subscription service provides for any party are 1) overcharging people who misgauge actually "needing" it when they don't end up flying enough to meet whatever your threshold for judging that is, and 2) actually not fully charging super-frequent fliers for the amount of workload they put on the system.
But who is going to keep up with the “frequent travelers”?
Yes, because I did the interview. But then I've done the background check and interview for jobs as well. And honestly, there's a ton of that information about you in computers if you travel by air at all. Don't fly (in particular) if you want to be anonymous.
And like I said in another reply, the country you grew up in was probably different than the country my still living parents grew up in in the Jim Crow south.
I think I asked what deposit they would need. It had never been an issue before.
"In fact, the TSA does not require, and the law does not authorize the TSA to require, that would-be travelers show any identity documents. According to longstanding practice, people who do not show any identity documents travel by air every day – typically after being required to complete and sign the current version of TSA Form 415 and answer questions about what information is contained in the file about them obtained by the TSA from data broker Accurint…."
https://papersplease.org/wp/2020/05/19/tsa-tries-again-to-im... https://papersplease.org/wp/2024/03/18/buses-trains-and-us-d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit...
Similarly though admittedly more permissive, with Amtrak iirc it's like: you need a credit card and they probably won't check your ID. There were several more years after 9/11 before the "papers please" principle came for the trains and buses too.
E.g. search turned up a claim Greyhound "employees are not allowed to sell a ticket without an official ID" https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/140703/i-have-no-...
You definitely need ID for hotels a lot of the time. Not sure the level where the regulations are put in place--probably varies--and Europe is probably more formal than the US in this regard. Was staying with a friend in Europe about a year ago and they had to take our passports to the police station to make us "official."
As I wrote elsewhere, I also had a challenge in the US a few years back but I expect that, had I been at my usual chain, there would have been a discussion with the manager followed by "I see nothing, I hear nothing."
ID is not security.
This conversation just doesn't seem promising. Your initial wildly-off claim got me worried I might misunderstand the world by that much (I remember the 70s, fuzzily). I wasted time checking it, wondering if the actual peak might be in a year not mentioned, trying to find the paper Wikipedia cited: it was a non-open-access paper with at least four links to check; one of them did show the first page, which at least gave the figure in question, if not the ultimate source.
I've taken Amtrak quite a bit in the last few years (Emeryville & Truckee in California, and NYC, Philly, BWI, and DC in the east), and I've never been asked for ID to board a train. (In other words, trivially easy for someone to do something nefarious if they wanted to.)
No security checkpoints, no ticket checking before getting on the train, just someone checking tickets on the train itself 10-20 minutes after it gets moving.
You also don't actually need an ID to fly, though if you try that, give yourself plenty of time to get through "extra security".
I’m sure they both have policies about it on the books, but I’ve never seen them enforced
Now, I have Global Entry (which includes TSA Pre).
I rationalized it in a few ways:
* "The Government" already has all the information GE wants. Finger prints, photo ID, "interview" (answering the question "Are you a terrorist?"). They got nearly all of this when I got a driver's license. (https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a32035408/dmv-selling-...)
* With modern corporate surveillance, corps already have a shit ton of "my data" that they will happily sell to anyone, including "The Government". (https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-databroker-files-wie-uns-apps-un...)
* If I'm flying anyway, the airlines already collect (and are legally required to collect) all sorts of personal data that I would rather them not have. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_name_record)
Yup. The people I've talked to who failed their GE interviews all failed because they lied and didn't admit to something shady that DHS already knew about them.
I doubt it.
Technically, legally, right now, maybe the Colorado DMV's database isn't accessible to other parties. How strongly are you willing to bet that it's going to stay that way for the rest of your life?
I've lived in 5 states in the last 20 years, but none of them were Colorado.
A quick web search suggests that CO requires prints for licensing as an auto or motorsports dealer, but I can't find a requirement for getting a standard DL. I didn't look too hard, and I'm not claiming any authority here, but I remain surprised by the requirement.
"The information here covers identification and lawful presence requirements for Coloradans seeking a driver license, ID card or instruction permit... Per C.R.S. 42-2-107 and 42-2-302, applications for credentials must contain a fingerprint."
CRS 42-2-107 concerns applications for driver's licenses and learner's permits, and CRS 42-2-302 concerns issuance of driver's licenses and non-driving identification cards.
My friends who were already in the state prior to 2017 never needed to get their prints taken to keep renewing their licenses. But since I moved here in 2019, I needed to provide mine, as do any teenagers getting their permits or licenses for the first time here.
But compulsory fingerprinting is too authoritarian for my tastes. I can still visit, right? :)
Maybe this was just a GenX thing, and isn't really done anymore, but in elementary school we were all fingerprinted.
They told our parents it was in case we were ever kidnapped it would help them find us.
You might be surprised about how many people's fingerprints the gov't has.
I just had a big dose of that this morning, getting my tool bag flagged by TSA, which I honestly expected, and told my calipers were not allowed (because maybe I'm going to hijack a plane by threatening to measure it??) but having my very sharp broaching tools, which could actually maybe do some damage as a weapon, completely ignored. And then, the second time through, after checking the calipers, having my watch case opener taken because it sort of looks like a knife, even though it's completely dull with no sharp edge.
Hmm. At least you weren’t threatening to measure the momentum very accurately. Since that would make the position unknown. Would that turn the plane into a slab?
this is retarded. there is no good reason to do this. if there is a good reason, i really don't care and would rather live in a freer society with slightly more risk.
"police state reduces crime" okay i do not care.
even their stupid IMS machines are just calibrated for lots and lots of type II error, and i don't believe they've actually ever caught anyone.
p.s. the sixties hijacking thing wasn't for purposes of terrorism. it's also why federal marshals started traveling around on planes.
They have no authority to take a weed pen or detain you for having one.
They can call cops but they can only confiscate items deemed to be threats to a plane and only detain you for the same.
The whole saga only ended after the Palestinians failed to overthrow the King of Jordan in the Black September uprising, and then traded the final hostages for another terrorist whose hijacking attempt was foiled by the crew and passengers (pilot nose-dived the plane to give the crew and passengers a chance to capture the terrorists).
Prior to those events, the standard protocol was to assume a diversion, a hostage negotiation and a standoff, with likelihood resolution without bloodshed. Hijacking was either for extortion or for a ride somewhere else. They would get the plane on the ground and start negotiating.
Post-9/11, the assumption is now the entire planeload is already dead and the hijackers DGAF if they get out alive. As a potential hijacker, this removes your primary bargaining chip.
Plus, the locked cockpit doors mean you can't get to the pilots. Even if you can somehow convince the pilots to get a message out, you'll get nothing. They'll just get to an appropriate airport whether or not you start killing passengers every 5min. Then, you'll just be shot by the SWAT team on landing. Moreover, in many countries including the US, the protocol now includes shooting down hijacked commercial airliners if the plane is deemed a threat to strategic targets [0].
So, since then, the likelihood of any potential reward from hijacking has gone to near-zero, and the risks have become essentially infinite.
And of course on top of that, despite the publicized failures, the security theater still substantially increases the risk of getting caught even trying to board a plane to hijack it.
You aren't locked in the airplane with the hijacker. The hijacker is locked in the plane with hundreds of people with nothing to lose.
Also of note: these 137 hijacking attempts resulted in 1 fatality. By contrast, in each of those years 55,000+ people died in car crashes.
People are terrible at judging risk.
>People are terrible at judging risk.
And nuclear power is judged, fairly or unfairly, by Chernobyl. I probably don't need to explain what the cultural baseline for risk of hijacking is, and why it's not the late 1960s.
Proves the GP's point exactly.
Cuba is a nearby non-extradition country. They did not decide to go to Cuba and hijack a plane to get there; they did other crimes and used the plane to attempt to evade law enforcement.
Well that's kind of what you'd expect a country to do if you treat it like a pariah and embargo people from even visiting as tourists.
It prevents a lack of funding for security pork. The TSA is a massive funding boondoggle for many many snake-oil security salespeople.
Full agreement with the point here: lock the cockpit doors, and let everyone go through the same level of security checks as TSA Pre.
A few things: we also put lots of effort into preventing mass casualty attacks in public places around the world (except the US govt in primary schools, for unfortunate three letter political reasons that begin with N and end with A). We generally don't want people to blow up planes because they're super expensive (even if we discount the lives of the passengers). Terrorists prefer blowing up aircraft to other things. When planes crash, they often hit people on the ground. And so on...
Seems to me a lot of terrorist attacks are blowing up buildings or driving vehicles into crowds or bombs in crowds or stuff like that. Not a ton of blowing up planes in transit in the overall list of terrorist attacks.
Do they? Other than 9/11, I'm personally unaware of this ever happening. 20 seconds searching says there was an airplane that crashed into a DC bridge in the 80's killing 4 motorists, and a couple of similar incidents, but it seems rare.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103
11 residents killed by falling debris.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Southwest_Airlines_Fli...
There have been more terrorist car bombings than plane bombings by several orders of magnitude.
There are lots of reasons people bomb cars. I would bet most of those organizations (1+ individuals) would prefer to blow up planes full of specific targets over specific targets.
Train and subway stations rarely have more than one or two armed officers if they have any at all.
Train tracks have shockingly little protection to prevent timed derailment sabotage. Buildings have little protection from being surrounded by accelerants and set on fire, etc.
There is a strange subset of things terrorists seem to want to do and society doesn’t do much to prevent the rest.
The justification for the TSA is that terrorist attacks like 9/11 could deal a disproportionate amount of damage compared to the effort needed to pull them off. But it's sort of a flawed premise because the 9/11 attacks relied on the element of surprise: the victims thought the attackers were pirates. Otherwise there's no way a couple of terrorists could fight off an entire plane with just box-cutters.
If you blow a hole in the side of a plane, then no one can disembark until the plane lands, and the plane itself may simply disintegrate mid-air, killing everyone on board.
Same story if you fill the bus or train with toxic gas, or try to start shooting, or literally any other form of attempted mass casualty attack. Planes are uniquely different to all other modes of transportation because you cannot disembark them quickly and the default failure mode is everybody dies.
It really broke the spell that America could fuck around in the rest of the world without finding out.
It seems like there are two problems:
1. No one wants to be the person who rolls back regulations, because they’ll be blamed the next time something goes wrong.
Even if the previous regulation wouldn’t have stopped it (again, TSA internal tests of people getting knives and guns through), that person is getting blamed.
2. There is simply a ton of money in this crap. Those companies have lobbyists and donate to campaigns.
Given (1), these congresspeople aren’t going to change it anyway so I don’t actually think corruption plays as much into it. They’d never vote to remove the regulations; campaign donations are free money.
Engineering orgs have similar problems. I remember at Stripe seeing the 12 years of accumulated processes. Every bug or incident needed a new process or automated checker to ensure it couldn’t ever happen again. None of these were ever reviewed or removed.
As an EM, even if I knew something was a net-negative when comparing dev velocity vs. risk x magnitude of a bug, no chance my manager would let me remove it.
It takes confident, independent leadership willing to make tough trade-offs to change these things. That’s pretty rare in my experience.
That's . . . a take, considering that OBL's main beef with America was infidel troops on the soil of Saudi, because the Saudi royals were the guardians of Mecca. And the Saudis asked us to intervene against Saddam.
9/11 wasn't some coherent beef with US foreign policy; it was bog-standard religious extremism of the Salafist Islamic flavor.
Why would he bomb US and not SA then? At least in his own words it was about foreign policy and Palestine among other things.
Am pulling this completely out of foggy memory but one of the justifications for TSA was that potentially local airport authorities would be considered liable for acts of terrorism like 9/11.
Pick your fallacy:
- We've spent billions of dollars on this stuff. Surely we wouldn't have done that unless it worked.
- We've spent billions of dollars on this stuff. It'd be a shame to let that go to waste.
- The TSA isn't perfect, but for every 30 handguns they let slip through they also successfully catch 1. That one could have taken over a plane.
...
And the results of those tests are widely misunderstood. Security isn't about a 100% success rate - that's the goal but not the outcome. It is about disrupting the planning process.
That someone, somewhere might sometimes get a gun through TSA security is one thing...but is that person intending to carry out a terrorist attack in doing so, or did they just leave it in their bag?
Is it possible for anyone to organize a coherent plan which involves as a first step smuggling weapons onto a plane in a way which is not more likely then not to be detected?
And is the correct conclusion from "in a test (where we motivated someone to try a plan they couldn't be sure would succeed but which would have no personal consequences for failure) they succeeded" that the security is pointless, or is it that they need to modify their procedures to improve the detection rate?
I think you might be misunderstanding the scope of the issue. In testing, guns get through screening more often than they get stopped.
Some airports are known to be 'black holes' for luggage, from dealings with Swissport who handles lost&found everywhere, they mentioned that Fiumicino airport near Rome didn't have stellar reputation to say politely, and Barcelona wasn't that great neither. Had luggage lost on both in rather annoying way - both of them didn't have a clue where it was for more than a week, started saying goodbye to all rather costly equipment like paraglider set in it.
But I've seen stuff get lost in places like Vienna multiple times, so one can't draw any simple conclusions. I see it as a massive room for improvement and automation via 'AI', but that should have been done a decade ago, ie automated barcode scanning isn't novel tech.
For the frequent traveler who is loyal to an airline, a lot of those problems go away.
We are Delta loyalists and both Platinum Medallion.
1. When we buy a main cabin seat, we get upgraded immediately to Comfort+ for free.
2. When we go to the airport, if we don’t use curbside check in (and tip), we get to use the Sky Priority Checkin line and have two free checked bags
3. We have TSA Pre-Check and Clear to skip the line
4. After check-in, we head straight to the Delta, Amex Centurion or Priority Pass lounge where we have plenty of seating free food and drinks (alcoholic and non alcoholic)
5. When boarding, we get to board early because of our C+ upgrade (Zone 3) or worse case Zone 4 and have plenty of overhead space if we need it and get to be situated early.
But we are talking about $85 for five years for PreCheck.
But as far as security, the only difference pre check makes is that you don’t have to take your belt and shoes off.
I mentioned earlier that newer scanners don’t require you to take electronics out of your bag whether or not you have PreCheck
I think PreCheck probably goes faster too because people with PreCheck mostly know the drill.
That hasn’t happen before or since. At that time I had a client laptop, my company’s laptop (working in consulting), my iPad, and an external USB powered portable monitor in my carryon.
Poorly worded question - I’m glad you guys know how to travel well together and often. The only thing I miss about my college girlfriend was when we got an overnight delay in Denver and the crazed associate told us “I don’t fucking know” when we asked about the details of our hotel she said: “I mean this sucks but it’ll be okay hahaha”
I try to perpetuate that mindset nowadays lol. End monologue
https://www.flightsfrom.com/CHS
If you don’t fly often, airline loyalty doesn’t matter. I just don’t hate myself enough to fly Southwest and deal with non assigned seats even though they do have the most non stop flights from our current airport
It is flightsfrom/airport code/optional airline code
For instance these are Delta flights from CHS.
Then if you are flying with another person there is no guarantee that you two can find a seat together.
Then you might be in the middle seat.
That's certainly the line that can't be compromised, ultimately you fly because you wanna get somewhere. But finding and choosing favorite airline(s) has many perks that aren't easily quantifiable, enough that many frequent flyers choose to focus their patronage for those benefits.
I'm personally a Delta fanboi because Northwest was my childhood airline on family vacations. My Delta SkyMiles account goes all the way back to 1998 when my dad opened it for me as a kid, back then it was Northwest WorldPerks.
Small tangent story: Delta SkyMiles was instrumental in my getting an AMEX credit card as my second ever card with merely 6 months credit history as a literal newcomer nobody to the credit world. It's been my favorite card to carry ever since.
Clear is $189 a year or $239 (?) for two people.
I definitely didn't feel respected during covid. There was a mask rule, standard for the time, fine. But then they give out drinks, okay. They were extremely strict, you must sip your drink and have your mask on again within less than a second. Long sips, unacceptable. Pause in your sip, unacceptable, there needs to then be two sips with an intermediate remasking. The air staff were quite 1930s Germany as far as the rigor of their enforcement of this rule. This has all the charm and beside manner of a driver laying on their horn 200ms after the red light turns green. Quite bizarre, the mask fetish, when most passengers were vaccinated and there's this huge vector of spreading the disease called touching things with pathogens on their surface aka fomites.
What I find annoying these days are those people who theatrically mask up and then look at you like you're supposed to do the same. Luckily it's very uncommon in aviation now. A bit more in the metro but they can just walk elsewhere if they want.
TSA requires a background check and fingerprinting.
Why should I have to pay at all? Why not make everyone going through security pay $5 every time to recoup the costs for the TSA through user fees?
And it's not like it's only $70-85 every five years, it's per person so I'll have to buy for my whole family. Quite a bit more than just $70! And in the end it's all bullshit anyways. Just a way to sort people willing to give up the money versus those who don't know, don't want to, or can't pay.
And kids up to 17 don’t need Precheck if flying with a parent
Are you really complaining about spending $70 once every five years to give me TSA Precheck? You won't even notice paying for my Precheck.
Why should I pay for your usage of the TSA? Why not have all $7.55B entirely funded by direct user fees, handing the TSA agents cash or tap a credit card while you go through the scanner? Why should I pay for your airports (often constructed with massive tax subsidies and grants)? Why should I pay for the highways you drive on to go to your airport?
> we are only talking about taking your shoes off and belt.
No, we're also talking about stereoscopic facial scans, high resolution millimeter wave scans of my body, yet another centralized government database tracking my movements, having to showcase all my valuables to all the other passersby by dumping all the electronics out of my bag, wasting my time, wasting our tax dollars, for pretty much no benefit. Ooh but I can skip the line if I surrender more biometrics and pay extra! How nice!
You don’t. A tax is added on to every airline ticket I buy.
> Why should I pay for your airports (often constructed with massive tax subsidies and grants)?
Airports make the city money
https://online.fit.edu/degrees/undergraduate/aviation-manage...
> Why should I pay for the highways you drive on to go to your airport?
Airports make money from parking and many charge a surcharge to ride share companies.
> No, we're also talking about stereoscopic facial scans, high resolution millimeter wave scans of my body
You still have to go through the same scanners with TSA Precheck
> yet another centralized government database tracking my movements
If that’s your concern, why would you want TSA Precheck where you have to give the government your fingerprints and go through a background check?
And the airline already knows you are on the plane. They check ID when you check in.
> wasting my time, wasting our tax dollars, for pretty much no benefit
Not getting blown out the sky is a pretty big benefit.
You know you don’t have to y if you don’t want to.
I'd rather just have practically none of it because it's largely a waste of money and time and a major inconvenience while providing practically little real security.
> Not getting blown out the sky is a pretty big benefit.
Tons of other countries have far more basic security at airports. They're not constantly having planes blown out of the sky. Airlines operated for decades before the formation of the TSA and millimeter wave scanners and taking off our shoes and stereoscopic face scans and yet they were not getting blown out of the sky.
Also technology improved that the terrorist had.
- Amex Delta Platinum Card - $350 Annual Fee and you get a companion pass - buy one get one free round trip ticket anywhere in the US, Mexico, Central America, or the Caribbean and a $150 hotel credit.
- Amex Delta Business - the same benefits except a $200 hotel credit.
- Amex Delta Reserve - an up to first class companion ticket and a $200 Hotel credit + lounge access.
It takes $15000 MQDs to reach Platinum Medallion. But if I flew less, I would only care about Silver Medallion where you get sky priority Checkin and preferred exit row seats (extra legroom) for free.
Just by having those two Platinum cards would give you the $5K MQDs to get Silver. Either of those cards give you free checked bags. Medallion status gives you an extra checked bag.
You get 1 MQD for every dollar you spend on flights and $1 MQD for every $10 you spend on the Reserve or $20 you spend on the Platinum. You get $2500 MQDs for each of those cards.
I got the other $7500 MQDs last year between flights and credit card spend.
Oops. You’re supposed to tip for those?
But here is more information about it
What we don’t have is an expensive car - we bought a cheap new car that is less than half the median cost of a car in the US. We don’t have expensive housing - we downsized to a 1200 foot condo after our youngest graduated. We don’t have state taxes - we moved to state tax free Florida. We also don’t have any debt besides the condo that we put 30% down on. Our mortgage is much lower than the average mortgage.
In the grand scheme of things, our travel budget is less than 10% of our gross comp and I don’t work at BigTech (been there done that). Even half of that is offset by not having to pay state taxes which we did before we moved in 2022.
Which is also why we can't have faster planes. It's not good for fuel economy.
As if rich people are not universally hated enough, lets show off to everybody by flying marginally faster and polluting way more in super cramped very loud tubes. Some technical challenges can be maybe addressed these days but not all of them. Unless folks fly half around the world time spent on airports takes away massive chunk of overall flight time anyway.
And you don't give two fucks about the negative environmental impact of flying? Or at least, feel a little shame or entitlement?
Ditto for a high-speed rail network throughout the continental US.
Until then, it's simply unhelpful to try to shame people for not opting out of employer-mandated travel or limiting their vacation days to a 300-mile radius (or insisting that they spend multiple of those days driving).
Then should I do nothing or should we all do nothing? The perfect is the enemy of the good.
And no one can answer the question of how my flying in a plane that was already going to fly reduces emissions.
I could also clutch my pearls and say people who drive into work instead of choosing a job that allows them to work remotely and refusing to be in an office would help climate change.
Of course that would be silly and self serving. I bet everyone criticizing me would love to be in a position to have unlimited PTO, work remotely and be able to travel more.
Not that we are rich - we are 50, empty nesters, downsized our home and moved to a state tax free state along with other fixed cost saving moves
you can worry about your carbon footprint or not - your choice - but this is about as silly of a statement as they come. this is like being nazi in Auschwitz and going “well someone else would commit these heinous crimes so what’s the difference if I do it.” you do your part - that is what you are in control in and what you can decide on based on your beliefs. but to say “well shit, this plane gonna take off anyways so imma just jump onboard and take a couple of seats that are available” is not an acceptable argument
Did you choose a job where you didn’t have to go to work and cause carbon emissions?
You purposefully chose a job where you decided to drive into work. Did you buy a house close enough to work to walk or ride a bike?
Whet sacrifices have you personally made to reduce your carbon footprint?
Did you choose a job where you didn’t have to go to work and cause carbon emissions?
yes, I am a contractor and have been working from home-office since 2007
You purposefully chose a job where you decided to drive into work. Did you buy a house close enough to work to walk or ride a bike?
yes, I also chose a private school for my kid which is nearby and we bike to school weather-permitting roughly 75% of the time
Whet sacrifices have you personally made to reduce your carbon footprint?
I drive EV. My wife and I donate 10% of all our pre-tax earning significant portion of which goes to Oceana. I installed solar panels on my house long before it was even remotely economically feasible… We try to do our part, even in cases where it is a bit of theatre more so than actual benefit (recycling for instance)
Why? Why does everybody think that they've got the God-given right to fly thousands of miles away to just lie at a beach for 3 days and come back? Why don't they realize that they are probably already very fortunate in life and with that fotune comes some responsibility?
Maybe it's not helpful shaming them, but the more we de-normalize this behavior, the fewer people are going to do it.
Still hate the experience in comparison to modern rail.
But security theatre is apparently necessary, see "golden age of hijacking" 1968-72: over 300 events in five years, that's a hijack a week!
the problem with back to front is that people in the back would put their bags into overhead bins in the front, which they can easily pick up on the way out. However, you cant walk backwards for pickup, so the read overhead bins would be empty and inaccessible by the people boarding last.
I was a traveling consulting when people did such things. I got to see this silliness 2-3x/wk
I think it’s just that your eyes’s reach trends towards the front of the plane. If it’s busy when you try to stow away your bag, chances are you will prefer putting it in a meter towards the front of the plane (where you’re standing anyways, waiting for the person before you to stow away their bag) over cramming it in above your head, where the other bags already are.
Incentivize people back towards checking their bags, the process would be more efficient all around.
My biggest pet peeve is how they call groups successively, but dont actually let the lines exhaust before calling the next group. Successive groups realize that the lines are all mixed up, and people stop honoring groups and just all jump into line. Chaos ensues.
Some airlines give you gate checked bags right upon exit at the bridge. This is OK.
Others put it into the pile of luggage at Baggage Claim. This adds another 45min to your trip.
So your best strategy when you realize this is happening is to get in line to try to time getting to the front roughly when your zone will be called.
Delta gate agents very frequently do this and it’s super annoying because it defeats the point of their bajillion zones.
If I get a free upgrade to first class, I can already be sipping on my free prs board alcoholic beverage.
I do remember being on business in East Asia and how orderly these things operated.
- people needing extra time
- military
And then they are call by Zones
- 1st class boards first sho are at the front of the plane (Zone 1)
I think zone 2 is Diamond medallion. More than likely unless they bought a last minute ticket on a full plane, they would at least be C+
- Comfort+ boards next who are behind first class (Zone 3)
- Gold Medallion boards next and they are in the main cabin (Zone 4)
Those four zones above have a dedicated lane and should have plenty of overhead space close to their seat.
Below those four is where the upheaval starts especially if you fly out of Orlando like I do now with a lot of infrequent fliers. At that point, everyone is Main cabin jockeying for position and overhead space.
Even then Zone 5 isn’t bad. You get that by either having a cobranded credit card or being the lowest medallion level - Silver
Premium fliers would never go for the trade of “you get to pick between having a guaranteed overhead bin slot and sitting at the back of the plane”.
It works so much better when there is a system and everyone follows it.
I would be more willing to check bags if they return your baggage right after the flight, instead of losing the bags on a connecting flight and shipping it back to me a week later.
I think they are colluding to make business class more value.
Like some sort of class warfare enshitification.
The experience of flying first class is better than it's ever been, and all that extra comfort, convenience and luxury has come 100% at the expense of the experience of the unwashed masses flying "Economy" class. First class gets lie flat beds, priority boarding, lobster thermidor and hot towels, while economy seats keep shrinking, boarding times get longer, checked baggage that used to be free costs $100, and a child-sized bag of peanuts costs $5.
The reason airline travel sucks so much these days is because it's supposed to. If you're flying economy class, the airlines literally see you as a burden, rather than a valued customer, and are doing everything in their power to make your experience as awful as possible, while squeezing every last penny out of you in the process.
If DOGE was really about efficiency and cutting waste, TSA would be the first place they would be looking.
But it isn't obvious the Trump administration would have to worry about that. They've already saturated the screaming. There isn't anything worse to call them than Nazis and there are a couple of years of the administration left. We can hope someone thinks to tidy the TSA up.
I do wish it was someone smarter doing this, but only a President already hated by all the elites could do this degree of upheaval and get away with it.
Anyway, he's not the real power, here.
But as others have pointed out, a lot of the TSA processes (taking off shoes, laptops, liquids, etc.) are pointless.
What prevents another 9/11 are the cockpit doors, which have nothing to do with TSA.
We need about as much security around the airport as we need around a subway or a concert.
After the dark knight shooting, we didn't find the need to put up xray scanners in every movie theater. It's dumb to do that with airports.
as soon as we have 2.7 million people in subway and/or concert daily in the US you'd be right... until then...
Like what?
In the absolute worst case it grounds flights nation wide and 100 people die. In the grand scheme of things that's a minor hiccup and not a likely outcome. We saw a bigger impact from the polar vortex.
The security simply doesn't match the value.
I'll remind you that 70 people died from an airplane accident. Tragic, but we were hardly impacted by it. When you talk about 2.7 million flyers, the impact of a few hundred dying a year still makes it one of the safest forms of travel.
Airplanes aren't special and shouldn't have the annoying special security treatment they do today.
amen! but we know that ain't happening
Nowadays, any would-be hijacker is going to get immediately dogpiled and beat within an inch of their lives before they ever reach first class.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/29/11326472/hijacking-airplanes-e...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_17...
Post 9/11 everyone else just caught up (except minus the actually killing the person), see e.g. the shoe bomber guy.
Yeah. So much that, on the morning of 9/11, when a student in my college class was announcing there was a hijacking, I remember wanting to shout “Who cares? Those happen all the time and it gets resolved![1] Why is this a priority?”
… until he got to the part about it crashing into the WTC.
[1] Which, of course, still would have been out of line to say, but I was unusually cranky and didn’t get why that would be something to stop everything over.
I do know flying from Los Cabos Mexico where TSA doesn’t matter, I didn’t have to remove my laptop a couple of years ago
Before 9/11, airplane hijackers were like bank robbers: idiots trying to get some cash. If you just followed their orders, everyone would mostly get out alive.
Even mid-9/11, when it became clear that the hijackers were using the planes to attack civilians (at the necessary cost of the lives of the passengers), people stopped cooperating and stopped the final plane from reaching its target.
Even if someone walked into the cockpit with a gun they'd get nothing for their trouble but an immediate nosedive as the pilot sacrificed the plane to protect whatever the intended target was.
I'm not saying that we should let people board in full armor again, but surely there is a happy medium?
People do it all of the time for other reasons.
Too lazy to read the many GAO reports that all demonstrate TSA accuracy at finding dangerous items never topping 5%?
If DOGE was a real agency, maybe it would.
You say that as a dig, but a perception of safety is a real deterrent. If you can make your adversaries believe something is true, it doesn't matter whether it actually is or not. This is sometimes known as a bluff.
To be effective, safety measures don't have to block people who are smart and wouldn't commit the crime anyway. They only have to block the people dumb enough to do it.
If TSA is just theater, couldn't an attacker simply bring weapons sufficient enough to hold off the crowd and break the door? The hijackers on 93 only had box cutters.
It is the combined perception of airport security and the perception that passengers will fight that deter bad actors from even trying.
My point is that none of these things have to be impenetrable. There is a swiss-cheese model to safety. TSA doesn't have to be 100% effective to be effective. Every layer of security adds up. There is no single component responsible for all airline security, not even the cockpit doors.
I'm guessing they weren't though, in which case this is a false equivalency. People did hijack airplanes prior to (and during) 9/11
2. In the modern world, it's unclear whether hijacking is a severe risk to planes (compared to drones or missiles which are way more acquirable by terrorists and civilians than they were 25 years ago)
3. TSA has a documented and repeated ~80% failure rate at detecting threats. To the extent security theater is effective, you would expect that that effectiveness would disappear once everyone knew that they most likely wouldn't stop the attack.
Well, if we caught 20% of threats across the 19 hijackers on 9/11, there would have been a 99% chance one was caught. And a 67% chance that someone was caught in each group for each of the first 3 planes with 5 hijackers.
But even if they do miss 80% of the failures in penetration tests, what actually matters is whether or not real world threats are being caught. Threat actors in the real world act with different motivations than penetration testers, and with different skill sets.
I have a family member who works at a (European) airport in an administrative position, and apparently the security culture is quite deep and, I dunno, it sounds reasonable? As in, employees have clearances and passes to enter the more restricted areas (and they go through their own security points), the airport generally knows where the employees are and why they're there, the public areas have guards and many cameras and even the layouts of the stores and booths are subject to many security rules regarding materials and even stuff like camera sightlines.
...they would've nixed Trump's trip to the Super Bowl, which cost taxpayers 15-20 million all for him to leave early when his team lost.
They wouldn't be killing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which costs taxpayers nothing (it's funded by the big banks, aka The Federal Reserve).
The direction they seem to be going, they'll probably increase the TSA budget, add an extra hour to security lines, and make you take your pants off for some reason.
I took flights in the 2010's that didn't feel all that different from boarding a bus. You went to the desk to check in and to give them any checked baggage, walked to the waiting area to wait with a couple of dozen people, then went outside to board the plane. Any plane that would eventually connect to an international airport would have passengers go through security, but otherwise no.
When I take domestic flights within the US (between places like St. Louis, Denver, NYC, and LA), security takes far longer for several subtle reasons. Everyone has to show a government ID to a TSA employee (and get your photo checked against a database) before proceeding to the actual security lines. Then, most of the security lines use full-body scanners, not just metal detectors; some have moving parts and some don't, but they all require you to actually stand there for a second instead of just passing through. Every single person also has to take their shoes off before they go into those scanners, and you put your shoes through the same slower scanning system that the baggage goes through (which basically doubles the load and halves the bandwidth of the baggage conveyor belt).
In my experience, flying internationally out of/into the US (with both Japan and Canada as the other side) is no more security than flying domestically within the US. Which basically means we have full international-level security even for flying domestically here.
In a post-9/11 world, I took an airplane to university and back, and on a regular basis from [SMALL CITY] airport. I could, as a disorganized young adult, be at the airport within 10-15 before boarding time with luggage to check.
Pre-9/11, my family travelled internationally and it was always a 3+ hour, pack-a-lunch affair to be at [MAJOR CITY] airport.
You can tell it was pre-9/11 because you didn't need to throw the lunch away before getting to the part where you have to wait the longest.
But I've never had, like, a sandwich taken from me.
> eventually everyone will have [pre-check]
How do those two things follow? The government does a /bad/ job yet I have to submit to even /more/ monitoring to fix it? They're the greatest exploiters of the transport monopoly we have in the USA and so strong is their grip people don't even avail themselves of the obvious solution.
Except now with a subscription fee.
If you were picking someone up, you could also park in short-term parking, go all the way in to their arrival gate and meet them as they got off the plane, help them with their bags or just accompany them to your car. No fooling around with trying to time your arrival in the driveway or hanging out there blocking other traffic waiting for your party to appear and figure out where your car is.
This hasn't really changed. If you're willing to pay to park you can still park and meet them at bag claim or another outside-security exit.
I think people are just more rushed and there are more flights so more contention for parking.
Think of it like this. Suppose 1% of handguns get through security, and you are a terrorist. Do you really want to take on an assignment that has a 99% chance of ignominous failure and jail for life?
I remember as a kid in the 60s I was invited into the cockpit of the 707 to watch them fly. Of course, my dad being in his AF officer uniform probably helped :-/
I try to take the train whenever I can afford it (money and time-wise)
You man the bathroom sink... right?
I remember as a kid in the 90s you could do a little metal detector, and sometimes not even that, and get on a plane.
The changes to cockpit doors solves the 9/11 problem. Other than that guy who lit his underwear on fire one Christmas, I don’t know what exactly all of this is pretending to prevent.
The TSA’s own internal tests have people getting handguns through.
I have pre-check. Maybe eventually everyone will have it and the vast majority of passengers won’t have to take off shoes or take out laptops. Then we’ll get back to where we were decades ago.