Salutations to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for announcing earlier this month that people would no longer need to remove their shoes at security checkpoints in our nation’s airports. We should welcome exceptions to the generally rigid risk aversion in government-run airline security. And the really good news is that, formally or informally, sound risk management creeps in. It’s on display in today’s best-kept airline-security secret.
For more than two decades, Americans have been removing their shoes at airport checkpoints in response to a threat that never materialized in December 2001, the attempt of a numbskull named Richard Reid to detonate a bomb in his shoes on a US-bound international flight. Given the shock of the September 11, 2001, attacks, it is understandable that shoes would get a careful look in the months and years following Reid’s failed attempt.
But the threat of a bomb in a shoe detonating and taking out a plane is very low.
Numbskull? What kind of idiot picks through the chances of harm coming to airplanes in flight? We want zero shoe bombs, no matter their chance of success, right?
No. Policies that don’t balance risk kill people in a different way.
Infant travel is a rare exception to the risk phobia usually seen in air travel. It appears well settled that infants should be allowed to be unbelted on airplanes, because the alternative is not infants strapped into their own seats but infants in cars. And the risk of death by car accident for people of all ages is much greater than the risk of being on a plane.
“If the extra cost of buying airline tickets for the young children led only 5 to 10 percent of families to drive rather than fly,” a University of California San Francisco and University of Washington study of separate seating for infants found in 2003, “the projected increase in highway deaths would exceed the number of airplane crash deaths prevented.”
Moving people from airplanes to cars is deadly. And on some margin, the additional cost in time, aggravation, and embarrassment (yes) of having to remove shoes has moved American travelers into cars. Over two decades, millions of would-be flights have been switched to drives, and likely tens or hundreds have died.
The liquids rule, reactive to another failed attack, may also go by the wayside, according to a report on Secretary Noem’s comments. In 2006, UK surveillance revealed a nascent plan to smuggle constituents of a liquid explosive called TATP onto an airplane. The probability of such an attack coming to fruition is also very, very low, and it was defeated by a security layer quite far from the airport.
The inconvenience and cost of denying people the transport of liquids from one side of the security checkpoint to the other has also pushed people, on some margin, to auto travel and their deaths. But the “3-1-1” liquids rule has seen informal risk management. Formally, liquids must go in clear bags at checkpoints. Informally, they need not. Long gone are the days when a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent would throw out a half-empty toothpaste tube because it could hold three ounces of material. Such easing has mitigated the costs of the liquids rule and probably saved lives.
A similar nonchalance is going into another ill-advised security system, but it is airline security’s best-kept secret. Most people believe that one must have a federally compliant REAL ID driver’s license in order to fly, or some other ID such as a passport. In truth, REAL ID is not being enforced. The protocol is to swipe the hands of travelers presenting an ordinary driver’s license to test for non-existent explosives. The process takes far less than a minute, and it is often waived.
At larger airports, TSA positions an agent early in the security line to check for REAL IDs and perform the perfunctory swipe. Thus, the REAL ID requirement becomes a jobs program at TSA, one more of the ‘Thousands Standing Around.’
How many people have chosen to drive rather than fly because they can’t or won’t get a REAL ID? ID checks and REAL ID are nominees for Secretary Noem’s reconsideration. They do approximately nothing for airline security and probably kill on net.
The current administration has a sort of machismo (among men and women both) that allows overwrought airline security procedures to be revamped. Much as Nixon could go to China because of his toughness on communism, the Trump administration can handle a little more risk—a little more balance—and lead us to airline security policies that save more lives by further opening the skies.
The post Airline Security’s Best-Kept Secret appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.
