Live ... while waiting at the pleasure of an airline who's equipment is late for "unspecified reasons" ...

There is nothing like being late for a flight these days. In fact, it is highly recommended as the stress and worry (of missing the flight) really does focus the mind on the gymnastics the TSA people put passengers through. This sport is, of course, done for the resulting increase in "security".

Before going further, let's be clear: security has been increased.

While no sane person would argue against the cost of this increase in security, why does that increase have to involve a proportional increase in the level of bozosity that seems to creep through the system?

It is not the TSA hourly workers who implement the system that are at fault here, it is those who direct and set their policies and procedures - probably going far up into the amazing, Technicolor Dept. of Homeland security. Perhaps if some time were spent observing what happens, thinking about it and also balancing that against probable threats to the system, we could achieve a system that was:

• Even more secure
• Definitely more efficient
• More balanced with respect to passengers
• Less inconsistent from station to station, airport to airport

Unfortunately, the way things are going, pretty soon the average passenger is going to have to strip before being allowed through the scanners.

Let's take a few cases in point from this mornings exercise:

1. Why is it that laptops have to be taken out of bags? Only laptops. People carry other things that are as dense, have large batteries, or could conceal things. But laptops are singled out. Cameras are not. PDAs are not. Radios (including two way portable aircraft band radios ...) are not. GPS receivers are not. Does this make sense? Perhaps to a bozo ...
2. Shoes. Anyone with intelligence could have told the TSA people that their scanners were incapable of detecting anything in shoes - long before someone actually tried (rather successfully as it happens) to get something onto an airliner in his shoes. Why had none of "Those in Charge" worked out that threat vector in advance? Now we live with the knee jerk reaction: if it looks like a shoe, remove it - at some airports. While at other airports, the people actually use some intelligence and only require shoes be removed and scanned that look like they are actually big enough to contain something other than a pair of large feet. At other airports, it seems shoes are removed just to reduce false positives and help the speed up the flow of passengers. Where's the consistency? Does this really help security? Why are scanners not being re-engineered to deal with shoes? That would be the real solution. Question of the week: if you show up in bare feet, do you have to remove your feet and put them through the X-Ray machine??
3. 1 carry on and 1 personal item? What happens if people show up with more? Nothing apparently. Surely one way to police that situation would be to place such people in the extended screening line and rip is all apart? After all, who's the more likely to be carrying "unapproved items"? What actually happens is that everyone else gets to be delayed as these "cargo carriers" struggle to get their items processed through the scanner - in fact, TSA people, trying to be helpful, actually fuss around to get these people through faster. Why not just send them over to the "secondary search" line?
4. Ever noticed how processed seem to spawn "new positions"? In the interests of moving the process along, some TSA wiz-bozo invented the "queue director", now a feature at big airports. After wading through the uni-line that often snakes around the check-in area at such airports, passengers are then confronted with the queue director. This person stands between the passengers and the fan-out queues for the multiple scanners in service. In theory, the queue director is supposed to maintain an even load on the machines by distributing people evenly. Unfortunately, as anyone who's studied queuing theory could explain, the algorithm can't be done that way. Instead of stacking people in the fanned-out lines, it is better to keep them in the major lines and make sure the faned-out lines are never more than 2 or 3 people deep. Of course,  the queue director is not to blame: he or she operates as per procedural directive since TSA people are sadly required to operate as machines slaved to a procedure.
5. Then there are the machines - we know they can't scan shoes when you walk through scanners but what about those X-Ray machines? You'd have to be a bozo not to realize their shortcomings - but they won't be described here since to describe such things would probably cause a different type of bozo to try something...
6. Finally, there are the "random" secondary screenings. It is hard to understand the algorithm that is used to make these "random". It is hard to even understand if it is intentionally non-random - at least, it is hard to understand if it is non-random with intelligent purpose. Based on observations over the last year, it does seem that the system that selects subject passengers favors elderly women and older business types (male or female). Children, or families with children, never seem to be selected. It also seems that hale young people also generally avoid this process. Are we to believe if there is a next major event, it will be carried out by octgenarians? Or perhaps it is the older people who need to think that the system is working to protect them and making their security process more difficult gives them some added assurance of this? Or, more likely, is there is it a bozo who designed or is in charge of the algorithms used for the selection process?

Bottom line: wouldn't it be great if it were possible to easily give feedback to TSA management and planners? Ever seen a suggestion box? Ever seen an address - physical, email or web - posted to do this?

Hmmm. Perhaps that would be too obvious an improvement.