too young to remember 9/11? :)
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.
Were I to guess, the reason we focus so heavily on airports is because our lawmakers fly more than most of the population. The theater is likely their safety blanket.
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.
Too lazy to read the many GAO reports that all demonstrate TSA accuracy at finding dangerous items never topping 5%?
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.