... After The Horse Has Bolten

So This week's Stupid Airline Tricks award goes to the DHS and the TSA.

Their knee jerk response includes such wonderful things as no inflight maps and no announcements of landmarks and anything that could be used to give the passengers on the aircraft some reference point of where they might be.

A possible source of the official instructions can be found here. It is allegedly signed by Gale Rossides.

Er excuse me - i think on my itinerary it tells me when I am due to arrive. Also last time I checked we are surrounded by time pieces. But I didn't see anything in these instructions about giving up watches or banning watches from flights. I can just see the goons at various airports around the world removing Googlemaps, Google Earth, Atlases and maps from people's computers and carryons. Does the word cras come to mind?

So thinking like a conspiracy theorist - I think this is a sinister plot by the AFA to enforce passenger behavior on airliners. But I digress. I further think its possibly an attempt to not point out things that are obvious.

These rules (which carry an expiration date of Dec 30th), don't seem to offer much in the way of additional security. About the only thing it is going to do is to limit the spread of H1N1 or other communicable diseases as most US airlines don't bother to have clean blankets on board these days.

The TSA needs to get back into the game of thinking what is wrong with their elaborate schemes. They have developed a solution which has fundamental flaws in it. That needs to be rethought.

Oh and one more thing. At Schiphol they have the Air Blown Scanners are designed to detect PETN. However they are set up so that there is only one per gate. Thus if you leave from the H (low cost terminal) gates there are 3 scanners and the PETN based scanner is only on one. Not sure that is really a good idea.

If the US was truly interested in solving the issue of bringing chemicals onto the plane then it would would have long ago mandated a system of either 100% manual search or 100% scanner inspection.

But don't get me started on the multiple layers of the so called security that this chap passed through. This was exactly the same as the situation on 9/11. There was the ability to link the terrorists to at least one bench warrant for them. This shows that the central plank of the security namely not just identifying the real or potential bad guys but not letting them onto the plane is still a failure.

This breakdown means that this weeks Professor's Stupid Airline Tricks Award goes to the ladies Administrator Rossides (TSA acting) and Secretary Napolitano (DHS Secretary).

Now don't just sit there - do something!

Cheers