Fly Right

We have to stop this madness. The current security measures to protect commercial airplanes are well meaning, but they say over 90% of the cargo that sits below us in the belly of the jet is unscreened. It's no secret how to blow up a jet and it doesn't take a team of passengers building a peroxide bomb in the cabin.

It takes me an hour to drive to O'Hare Airport and less than that to fly to St. Louis. Add an hour for security and flying puts me in St. Louis in 3 hours, which is half the time of driving. Everyone continually has the jitters and sometimes it can take another hour to negotiate security. That little ziplock bag of 3 ounces of any fluid you might want with you is just one more way to encourage you to check bags, which I refuse to do. Checking bags adds bag retrieval time on the other end and the possibility of a dreaded "we don't know where your bag is" scenario, which can destroy a business trip. When you shave the difference between taking the train or driving to within an hour of what it takes to fly, why would I go through the increasing hassle to fly?

When I get on a commuter train, I'm riding mass transit, and because it would be impractical to screen passengers on every train and bus, we accept some risk for easy access. There's a price to exercise the freedom of mass transit because it is inherently vulnerable to attack.

Let's speak truth and stop kidding ourselves: a thoughtful and determined person who is willing to die is a formidable enemy. When people hate you so much that they will sacrifice life itself, their hate gives them an edge. Not every hateful person can be found, investigated, and stopped before they run amok. The US is a big place with porous borders, thousand mile fences notwithstanding, and the number of people in the world who hate us so much they want to die to prove it appear to be growing.

This has nothing to do with the fine folks in federal and local law enforcement, who are doing their best to keep us safe. It's the increasingly silly security protocols. No one's tried the shoe bomb thing again because now we have to x ray our shoes. No one's stormed a cockpit door because now they are pretty darn hard to break down. Terrorists may be hateful people but some are patient and thoughtful people, so they move on to something new.

Anyone who grew up on a farm or stayed awake in high school chemistry class knows how to build a small explosive from readily available and otherwise benign materials. This was true before larger quantities of liquids were banned in the cabin. If you work at it for a while, you can turn readily available and otherwise useful materials into a really big bomb and blow up a federal building. So before anyone listens to the folks who think we should start profiling passengers, let us humbly recall the last federal building was not blown up by an operative of an international terrorist group.

We should stop behaving like flying is the same as mass transit. You shouldn't be able to show up at an airport with a picture ID and stack of cash and buy a one way ticket to anywhere as long as your name is not on a no fly list. No fly lists are annoying and unintelligent: people simply change their names and buy a fake ID. Like driving, flying should be a privilege, not a right.

People who fly regularly should be able to register with law enforcement, just like gun owners. We should pay a fee to have a background check run on us and authorize the agency assigned to maintain our Safe Traveler data and update it as needed. We would then get a Safe Traveler ID, which would include the use of reasonable security devices to ensure we are who we say we are when we get to the airport and track our movements when we carry the card. If having your movements tracked seems un-American, get over it: if you own a credit card, toll way transponder, or cell phone, your movements are already being tracked. When Safe Travelers enter the airport, our bags will be screened, but we can keep our shoes on, carry on a bag and a bottle of water, and keep our laptops with us.

People who want no part of the program can still fly, but they are subject to an extra fee, being photographed, having a background check run on them, being thoroughly searched, and they must check their bags, fluids, and electronic devices. My proposal no doubt has flaws, but it's proactive, turns being trusted at the airport into a privilege, and it stops treating everyone on the plane like they're equally trustworthy. They aren't and there is no perfect system that will flawlessly protect us from people trying to express their hatred.

Or we could treat everyone like they're the same and fly naked. Or we could try doing fewer things that make people around the world hate us so much.

Nah, fly naked.

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