The other shoe

[This is the third, and longest (yikes) part of my “Too Frequent Traveler” series.  See parts one and two.]

Many flight attendants are so practiced at constantly repeating the same things at the same times that their body language subtly changes when they’re about to say something new.  I saw this happen a few days ago while struggling to simultaneously tie my shoe and buckle my seatbelt after a clumsy sprint from airport security to the gate.  At the conclusion of a stiffly rendered pre-flight safety video, the lead flight attendant paused oddly before announcing:

“What our new safety video didn’t mention is that if you have to put on your life jacket in the event of a water landing, please inflate only one side inside the cabin and wait until you’re outside to inflate the other side.  That’s not going to happen today since we’re going to have a great, landlocked, flight from Chicago to San Jose.”

This must be a fairly new policy since I distinctly remember snickering at past safety brochures and videos that clearly depicted eerily calm people dutifully blowing into their air vests while the voice-over admonished real-life passengers NOT to inflate their vests inside the plane.  Here’s my completely uneducated guess about how this happened:  Once there were two panels of industry experts.  One panel argued that obese people with inflated vests might get stuck in the emergency doors. The other panel argued that poor swimmers might panic upon hitting the water and lack the presence of mind to inflate their vests.  They commissioned a study to determine the ratio of obese people to poor swimmers on domestic and international flights. After much debate, a compromise was reached: tell passengers to inflate only half the vest. A number of routes were selected to participate in a pilot study of the newly revised announcements. Naturally, to minimize risk, they were all completely over-land routes. The follow-up study to determine the optimal half to inflate first is still in progress.

Perhaps I’m being unfairly pessimistic about this new “half-full” policy, but common sense is not the strong suit of the American air travel security system.  Neither is openness to questions.  This is a shame because arbitrary, opaque and confusing procedures are exactly what’s wrong with flying today.  Opaque security slows down the process, strains already overworked personnel and leads to passenger resentment and disenfranchisement.  This last side effect blunts the industry’s best anti-terror weapon:  The vast majority of travelers would be more than willing to help with security if they only understood the reasons behind the policies.  There is a big difference between actual help and the type of passive-aggressive “cooperation” that we’re habitually being thanked for when subjected to inconveniences and delays.  Passengers can’t help the system if they’re kept in a perpetual state of surreal resentment and confusion.  Who even knows what’s normal in airports these days?  That guy running around with no pants?  Maybe he just had to remove his belt for the metal detector and is about to miss his plane. 

Let’s get rid of the arbitrary stuff, the confusing stuff, the misleading stuff and the silly stuff.  Instead of fear and bemusement, let’s earn the useful respect of the public.  What do I mean by arbitrary and misleading? Everyone’s got their favorite illustrations:

I was once granted an extra-thorough search for simply asking why my flimsy cardboard poster tube couldn’t be brought as a carry-on (it was “club-like”), and I’m nearly paralyzed with fear at the sight of those “No Joking!” signs present at many screening checkpoints. What if I only look funny? When I asked a high-ranking member of the TSA why my friend was subjected to extra searching on each of his last dozen flights, I was assured that it was purely “random.”  There’s “flips a coin” random and then there’s “moves in mysterious ways” random.  The government is not an institution that ought to be permitted the latter definition.

Another problem with arbitrary policies is that security personnel don’t understand them either. Poor understanding often leads to poor execution, which often leads to funny results. Unfortunately, funny isn’t the goal.

For example, when my wife and I were returning from Alaska, we brought four suitcases to the check-in counter. The ticket agent punched in some numbers and told us that while my bags were cleared for check-in, my wife’s had been selected for a random hand-inspection. The agent wanted to know which bags were my wife’s. I tried, “Um, they’re all mine”, but she dutifully informed me that we were allowed only two bags per person and so would I please select which two were mine – and would therefore go straight on the plane, and which two were my spouse’s – which we would have to take back and carry to another line for hand-searching. Had I hypothetically stashed a box of Cuban cigars in one of the bags, that would have been a hypothetically good time to remember which one. At least I didn’t make a joke!

This is making us safe?

Ralph “Where’s” Waldo Emerson famously wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…” I used to love that quote in junior high school because (1) it justified the state of my room and (2) I knew what a hobgoblin was. Thing is, I didn’t do a lot of business travel in junior high. Now I think a bit of consistency is just what good and lawful security should have.

Take the selection of cutlery that gets served with in-flight meals.  On domestic flights, I always get plastic butter knives, but in international business class I often get metal ones – even when departing from a U.S. airport.  The dull two-inch blades are completely non-threatening and someone attempting to wield one in a melee would find themselves at a severe tactical disadvantage against any sufficiently blunt object.  But why allow the knives on some flights and not on others?  Why make such a transparent mockery of security procedures?  Much of the time, the plastic knife comes with a sharp metal fork. Did someone decide that it was less dangerous to get forked than buttered?  I smell a committee compromise. 

On a recent flight from Japan I was actually given five knives – three for dinner and two for breakfast. By TSA logic, that would have been enough to fight off a whole ninja clan, should one have stowed onboard.  Also, do they allow women’s stiletto heels on-board? Hang on while I look… they do!

Which brings me full circle to my favorite example of pseudoscientific and counterproductive airport security: the shoe removal ceremony. This started immediately after the “shoebomber” incident and many people think it’s done so the shoes can be checked for explosives. This is patently not true – the shoes are simply run through the x-ray machine so they don’t set off the main metal detector. The fact that shoes don’t set off metal detectors in any other country just proves that the sensitivity on US metal detectors is jacked up to 11. A couple of times, I’ve seen a TSA employee will walk up and down the security line and scan shoes with a wand so as to warn people in advance if their shoes had metal in them. I’m fairly certain that the wand was set to detect homeopathic amounts of metal, because it went off on literally every single shoe he scanned – including the “airport friendly: contains no metal” shoes I had just purchased for the trip. Of course everybody knows that sneakers don’t have metal, so he didn’t bother scanning those. 

Taking off shoes and belts is not just frustrating. It actively hurts security by creating a mass of disorderly, irritable and partially disrobed passengers clogging up the line. That kind of confusion is exactly what a patient terrorist needs to better his chances of exploiting the system. Some expert panel really ought to study this carefully.  Of course should it come to that, I’ve got the perfect compromise: hold your pants up with one hand and hop through on only one shoe.

[The TSA and airline security folks have a very tough job.  Despite my criticism in the last two parts, there's a lot that they're doing right. The next and final part will be about the stuff that works today, the stuff that'll work soon, and how to get there from here.]