What is your idea for "reasonable" security for scheduled air service?

Bill, don't bother applying for a job in government. I'm sorry but your common sense approach just won't fit in.
 
KennyFlys said:
Bill, don't bother applying for a job in government. I'm sorry but your common sense approach just won't fit in.
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Very early in my career I did a short stint in a government agency. I left. Unless I had the power to radically change things, it is highly doubtful that I would go back (besides being demonized, there is the issue of much lower pay for similar work... and benefits don't make up the difference).

I heard again today about how other agencies "promoted" their suboptimal employees to work at DHS when they were staffing up.... and hired the good ones away from DHS. And how even with in the agency there was a view that KHIAI. Very true story....
 
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KennyFlys said:
Bill, don't bother applying for a job in government. I'm sorry but your common sense approach just won't fit in.
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One man's common sense is another's unworkable solution.

Bill,

I manage a workgroup of thirty employees variously engaging in high-risk, high-volume activities; almost daily political nexus (nexi?) at the local, state, and national level; with an annual budget of about 3.2 million dollars. How much would that net me in the private sector?
 
smigaldi said:
Sorry the 3oz rule make no sense regardless of any threat assessment. The reason why is simple. 3oz is not a magic quantity.
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That's one reason. The other is that the way this is enforced is a joke. A friend of mine, yeah, that's it, a friend takes 6 oz toothpaste on flights all the time because he can't be bothered to buy smaller quantities. He doesn't bother putting them in a plastic bag either.

All that said, why bother with extensive "security" to begin with? It's not worth my tax dollars. Some basic screening perhaps to weed out the crazy folk, but other than that, a bad person would just do his deeds someplace that makes it easier. There's lots of them. Like right outside the TSA security line, as has been pointed out. It sounds mean, but getting a 1% increase in security isn't worth 100x the money.

-Felix
 
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alaskaflyer said:
One man's common sense is another's unworkable solution.

Bill,

I manage a workgroup of thirty employees variously engaging in high-risk, high-volume activities; almost daily political nexus (nexi?) at the local, state, and national level; with an annual budget of about 3.2 million dollars. How much would that net me in the private sector?
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Don't know enough to tell. Depends on the programs, type of activities, employer, whether there is technical training, geographic location (SoCal might pay more than McAllen) etc. My guess, inferring the subordinate salary range is that it might be in the range of $200K with a 30% performance bonus, plus benefits, at the likes of many defense contractors. YMMV.
 
alaskaflyer said:
One man's common sense is another's unworkable solution.

Bill,

I manage a workgroup of thirty employees variously engaging in high-risk, high-volume activities; almost daily political nexus (nexi?) at the local, state, and national level; with an annual budget of about 3.2 million dollars. How much would that net me in the private sector?
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Richard, there are some good folks who work in government. But, I feel pretty confident in saying they are few and far between. You can mentor employees to be excellent subordinates but I'm sure there are some you would like to send on their merry way and find a replacement.

It's those who hang on under policies and union contracts that make it hard to eliminate the "dead weight" and brings the quality of most government services down to a level usually not acceptable in the private sector. Well, except for customer service personnel in foreign nations.
 
KennyFlys said:
Richard, there are some good folks who work in government. But, I feel pretty confident in saying they are few and far between. You can mentor employees to be excellent subordinates but I'm sure there are some you would like to send on their merry way and find a replacement.
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Well, I don't work for TSA, I work for the DOI, but I can say without hesitation that around here deadweights are few and far between and don't tend to last very long because they can go somewhere else to work less and make more; and since I deal with a goodly number of contractors providing everything from office furniture to aircraft services to major construction projects I can say that based on my professional experience with the private sector (not to mention my personal experience with the private sector) I wouldn't trade my government coworkers for anyone from any private sector industry. Except maybe the lingerie modeling business.

Sigh. Maybe it is good that I am quite obviously useless and fabulously underqualified for anything other than government work. I have no idea how I would spend all that money that other folks are making.
 
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alaskaflyer said:
Well, I don't work for TSA, I work for the DOI, but I can say without hesitation that around here deadweights are few and far between and don't tend to last very long because they can go somewhere else to work less and make more; and since I deal with a goodly number of contractors providing everything from office furniture to aircraft services to major construction projects I can say that based on my professional experience with the private sector (not to mention my personal experience with the private sector) I wouldn't trade my government coworkers for anyone from any private sector industry. Except maybe the lingerie modeling business.
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You seem offended by our lackluster endorsement of the gummint sector. I assure you, your dept is in the minority. I'm a private employee, and I have dealings with gummint customers quite often. I work in hi-tech and here's some things I've found at gummint installations. Some have been at secure sites as well: Urine, feces, trash, etc stuffed into electronic assemblies. Power wires cut, and ripped out, high tension leads too! Pneumatic hoses stuffed with gum, or glue. Vacuum lines cut or disconnected. Backup tapes set on big transformer(erased). AC units destroyed by cutting the freon lines. Printers set on fire. Printers run with no ink rolls. CRTs smashed, keyboards crushed, removable disk drives with sand in them. All of this is done on purpose. I've seen some mistakes at private facilities too, but the amount of willful destruction done by gummint employees to get out of doing a shift of work is staggering. Sorry......
 
wsuffa said:
1) eliminate the ID check at security and stop the program to purchase expensive machines to read the bar-codes on the boarding passes. Revenue protection is a problem for the airlines, not the TSA. The no-fly and watch lists are ineffective. Redirect the money to more effective measures. Paperwork doesn't stop terrorists.

2) eliminate the 3-ounce restriction. It is ineffective and wastes a lot of time. Redirect the resources to more effective measures.

3) eliminate the random gate checks. Either do a good job at the checkpoint or admit you're incompetant. These checks serve only to harass customers (or in the case of WN, deny folks the priority boarding they've paid for).

4) institute capable profiling and observation with well-trained and experienced folks. Street sense.... most long-time cops have it. A 20 hour TSA training program can't possibly accomplish much.

5) do basic x-ray and metal detect screening. Run a quick chemical test on liquids... like certain other countries do. Eliminate the "dragnet" mentality and focus on weapons (not cash money, pot, etc).

6) do your best to speed up the lines. Acknowledge that a determined terrorist can take out more people and do more harm if they set off an IED in the middle of a checkpoint line at a busy airport during a high-traffic period. A 20 minute wait (BTDT) in a serpentine lne might have as many people as a plane load. So you've kept a plane from coming down, but you've caused as much death/injury and as much property damage what with the expensive check-point machines/building construction.

7) focus on on-board deterrence.

8) focus on managing the risk, not trying to eliminate ALL risk (can't be done).

The problem is that we started with a flawed system that folks figured a way around. Holes were plugged haphazardly. Now the overall structure is made up of "patches", meaning that the system is weaker than it might be with a true, bottom up risk-management design.
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You pretty much took the words out of my mouth. I started flying (aboard domestic carriers) pretty regularly for my job around 2001, and the only new thing I saw that made me feel good was machinery for sniffing baggage (something I'd been waiting to see since the Lockerbie bombing).
I haven't, however, seen much since then (over something like 15 RT airline flights) that would stop a repeat of 9/11. I have seen a lot of underpaid, undertrained people blindly following a pretty ineffective checklist that creates far more inconvenience than safety. It seemed knee-jerk then, and not much has improved, as far as I've seen.

I will say that for the most part, my airline experiences have been bearable- in fact, the worst thing, for me, about the post-2001 policies is being delayed and inconvenienced by pax who are not prepared for them. The Stupid Factor does not seem to have been considered. Those of you who "fly", as they call it, on a regular basis know what I mean. Stupid. Like stunned cattle.
Something has to be done about the liquids policy. That system doesn't work. I never, ever carry even Chapstick- if I have toiletries, they go in the checked luggage, or they don't go. It'd be nice to not pay gate prices for food and beverages, but oh well. So I don't have a problem with it, unlike many others. The problem is the baggie thing. It creates havoc in the lines. I've seen several arguments over it... big time-wasters. My favorite was a flap over the fact that TSA was providing bags, but they were not regulation size. Or it's "Why? Why? Why can't I haul this 1-liter glass bottle of cologne into the cabin?" they always seem to be in front of me. Must I show up 2 hrs. early for this?
People who bring toiletries and cosmetics on board seem obsessed with them, and their right to have them handy. It's a source of drama. If it were up to me, I'd propose banning such stuff outright (in the cabin). That would save a lot- a lot- of time and grief for everybody. Hard to say what the reaction would be, but man, would that make me happy.


The days of elegant air travel didn't end on 9/11, they ended long before that, when flying became affordable for just about everybody. I don't expect so much. Heck, I used to fly People Express back in the day (but at least they let smokers light up on the planes!!).
So I don't mind the little indignities (I have the checkpoint striptease, bin-grab, and laptop-prep thing down cold, and always wear slip-on shoes), but I do mind getting flagged for randoms, while people I would profile as "suspicious" breeze aboard the plane. I don't mind the screening in principle, it's perfectly reasonable in principle, but it could be more transparent and quicker, yet effective, if the other more effective measures (profiling, armed security) were enhanced.

The system is out of balance. That guy watching me take my shoes off for the second time because I left the gate area to have a smoke, outside a glass door within sight of the checkpoint could be doing something more useful, I think. That only happened to me once, but... it was stunning.

We need more air marshals. Maybe on every flight. I know good air marshals are expensive, but if the funding for most of the other nonsense was tapped to meet the cost of increasing their ranks, it might balance out. Or it might cost a little more.... but be worth it.

Tell you what- I'd pay a premium to not have to spend so much time in line or deal with random searches if I knew there were savvy profilers on the case from the time the ticket was purchased until boarding, trained snoops wandering the gate area, and an armed guard aboard the flight. Every flight. And there's no reason for them to be incognito, except perhaps to avoid hijackers planning to attack the marshal first (if you were planning to commndeer a fligt with a razor blade, would you feel confident if you saw an armed agent aboard? Maybe the flight crew, and the cabin crew, should all wear external holsters. the guns wouldn't even need to be loaded, LOL).

Metal detection, x-raying (and sniffing) luggage, and a liquids policy of some kind would still be necessary, but it could be done a lot better. Common sense seems to have been abandoned in order to make a big show of appearing to be in control of who and what boards the planes.

As for the Flight 93 factor, I wouldn't just sit there either, myself, but it would take more than one person. It's not a solution you can count on, from the standpoint of the TSA and the airlines.
 
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