Transportation Security Administration

Well, it’s partly because the government’s list of known or suspected terrorists — the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE — contains more than half a million names. Abdulmutallab himself had been added to this list, but at a certain point a database this vast and unwieldy does more harm than good.

And although he’d been added to TIDE, Abdulmutallab had not been placed on any active watch lists or the so-called no-fly list — a failure of government intelligence sharing eerily reminiscent of the FBI-CIA disconnect that helped facilitate the 9/11 plot.

Here we are at a point where innocent preschoolers or entertainers (Cat Stevens) are denied boarding because of confusion over names, but somebody like Abdulmutallab steps onto a plane with no trouble. Our overzealous obsession with terrorism, together with bureaucratic bungling, has, predictably, bit us in the rear end.

Speaking of predictable, down on the front lines, our beleaguered Transportation Security Administration (TSA) rushed to action. The agency’s first mandate was a nonsensical and short-lived requirement that all passengers on flights over U.S. soil remain seated for the final hour of flight, with no personal belongings (personal computers, etc.) in their laps or on tray tables. The thinking here was difficult to fathom. Presumably a bomber can only act while standing up? And presumably he would call off the attack if he had to detonate, say, 70 minutes from landing instead of 60, or out over the ocean? Funny, I remember Pan Am 103 exploding in the first hour of flight, not the last.

TSA got the point, thankfully, and the no-standing rule was quickly rescinded and left to the discretion of the captain.

Several days later TSA announced that persons traveling to the United States from at least 14 foreign countries would be subject to stricter screening procedures, including enhanced pat-downs and hand-luggage inspection.

“Profiling,” this is called. Profiling is a difficult thing to orchestrate correctly, and as security experts will tell you, routine is weakness; as soon as a perpetrator knows what you’re looking for, the system becomes easy to skirt. Maybe a traveler coming from Yemen or Saudi Arabia deserves some extra scrutiny, but there are nearly 200 countries in the world. What happens when the next attacker is from Malaysia, or France, or Canada? Richard Reid, I’ll remind you, was a citizen of Britain.

Still, even the coarsest form of profiling is a better approach than TSA’s current philosophy, in which each airline passenger — of every race, gender, age group and nationality, from an infant child to a uniformed crew member — is considered a potential suspect and held to the same screening standard. This has created a ponderous airport security apparatus charged with the impossible task of confiscating any weapon, real or perceived, from 2 million people every day. Just as a terrorist watch list containing 500,000 names becomes useless under its own weight, TSA’s screening rules have become ultimately unenforceable.

Its reactionary policies in general are folly: The hijacker uses a box cutter; we ban box cutters. The bomber stands; we ban standing. And so on, in a childish, rock-paper-scissors version of national security.

Calling all artists: One thing TSA needs, I think, is a better logo and a snappy motto. Perhaps there’s a graphic designer out there who can help with a new rendition of the agency’s circular eagle-and-flag motif. I’m imagining a revised eagle, its talons clutching a box cutter and a toothpaste tube. It says “Transportation Security Administration” around the top. Below are the three simple words of the TSA mission statement: “Tedium, Weakness, Farce.”

Seriously, though, I am optimistic that the Christmas Day incident will encourage TSA to revise some of its protocols and reevaluate the hierarchy of threat. As I’ve been saying and writing for eight years, and as Reid and Abdulmutallab have demonstrated, it’s explosives, not box cutters or penknives, that are the most potent criminal threat to commercial aircraft.

Let’s go back to Sept. 11, 2001, for a moment. Does anybody seriously believe that the success of those attacks relied on the ability to get box cutters through the X-ray machine? Could the hijackers not have fashioned a deadly knife from any of a thousand other objects or materials, from a broken bottle to a ballpoint pen? Of course. The attacks had nothing to do with airport security, and everything to do with the element of surprise. What the hijackers exploited was not a weakness in security, but rather a weakness in our mind-set. That is, our understanding and expectations of hijackings at the time. All of that is changed now, and today a box cutter is all but a useless weapon.

What’s not a useless weapon, however, is a bomb. And just as the hijack paradigm has changed, our approach to airport security needs to change as well.

Much to its credit, TSA already does an excellent job backstage, as it were, with comprehensive explosives scanning of checked luggage. Concourse guards too are trained to inspect carry-on bags for deadly materials and devices. Even Kip Hawley, TSA’s recently departed chief, openly acknowledged the need to refocus efforts on bombs. All good, but TSA needs to do more, and it can start by backing away from its wasteful preoccupation with pointy objects, reallocating staff and resources.

Where this might take us, though, is controversial. There is talk about the widespread deployment of full body scanners — machines that see through clothing — which segues into the not insignificant matters of privacy and civil liberties.

It’s also true that no matter how rigorous our screening might be, we’ll never be completely safe. I hate to say it, but eventually there will be a bombing. And when it comes we will scold and flagellate ourselves over what we take to be a failure to protect ourselves. But perhaps this is unfair, because the painful truth is, there will always be a way for a determined enough adversary to bypass whatever safeguards we have in place. This has been the reality when it comes to knives, and it’s the reality for hardcore explosives as well. There are no methods or technology, existing or emerging, that can root out every conceivable explosive, only a few ounces of which are needed to destroy a plane. We can improve our odds, but we cannot, ever, erase the threat entirely. There is a level of risk we need to acknowledge, and live with.

Neither is it any TSA screener’s responsibility to thwart terror plots. That job belongs to the CIA, FBI, Interpol and other law enforcement entities, and not to a concourse guard making $15 an hour. As we saw over Christmas, these entities have their own problems to work out, but they, not TSA, are responsible for the grunt work of keeping terrorists away from planes. TSA exists as a last line of defense, and indeed its methods ought to be thorough. But unfortunately, if a perpetrator has made it all the way to the airport, chances are that he or she knows how to beat the system.

Meanwhile I am repeatedly asked why America cannot adopt an airport security system like that of the Israelis, who are known for tight and effective security that, in stark contrast to our own, is not bogged down in petty fixations with pointy things and miniature shampoo bottles. The Israelis are masters of profiling, using a wide range of data points, from national origin to speech patterns, for every passenger.

As I wrote in a column three years ago after a trip to the Middle East, the answer is pretty simple: Israel is a tiny country with a single large airport — Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International. America has hundreds of commercial airports, including several of the world’s busiest. Applying Israel’s techniques to a theater as vast and bustling as ours would be an immense logistical challenge, and exorbitantly expensive to boot.

Not that we can’t, or shouldn’t, adopt certain aspects of the Israeli expertise.

And lastly, a technical note. If Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had not failed, and had his diaper bomb exploded, would the plane have crashed? This was a question raised in a piece on Slate  on Dec. 29.

The answer is maybe. A bomb destroys a plane not by igniting the fuel tanks, but by violently rupturing the pressurized fuselage. Even if the rupture is relatively small, the entire plane can be ripped apart in literally just a few seconds by the resultant forces. This is what happened with Pan Am 103 and the UTA bombing back in the 1980s, among others. Any fuel tank explosions were just a byproduct of the in-flight breakup.

Abdulmutallab was carrying approximately 80 grams of the chemical PETN. That was more than enough to blow a hole in the A330′s fuselage, but whether the plane would have crashed isn’t clear. The precise dynamics of an explosive decompression will differ, depending mainly on the aircraft’s altitude (i.e., the level of pressurization), speed and the specific location and size of any breach. (The luggage bomb that brought down Pan Am 103 initially created a 15-foot, star-shaped hole.)

There have been several instances of safe landings made after an in-flight explosion tore through the fuselage, including that of TWA Flight 840 in 1986. 

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Do you have questions for Salon’s aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his Web site and look for answers in a future column.

For that matter, would any of these measures have prevented the terrorist bombing of Pan Am 103? How about the bombings of Air India 182 or UTA 772?

Again the answer is no. It was bombs in the lower holds that got those planes.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m on a plane I worry a lot more about what’s going on below deck — in checked luggage and cargo — than I do about passengers and their carry-ons. The Transportation Security Administration tells us that all checked bags are scanned nowadays for explosives, and that’s about the most valuable thing the agency does for us. I just hope agents do it with as much over-the-top scrutiny as they use to paw through carry-ons looking for forks and toothpaste.

I’m traveling off-duty, just a regular old passenger. Approaching the body scanner, I “opt out,” as I always do. I’ll be taken aside for a thorough pat-down.

I don’t opt out because of worries about radiation. I do it because I find it appalling that passengers are effectively asked to pose naked in order to board an airplane. And because the scanners are strategically ineffective. I don’t “believe in them,” you might say. I mean, think about it: You’ve got a scanner at one checkpoint, but no scanner at the one right next to it; scanners at some terminals, but not at others. Are terrorists really that stupid? And what about overseas? If somebody is going to sneak something deadly through a checkpoint, it is far, far, far more likely to happen at an airport in Asia, Africa, South America or the Middle East, than in Peoria, Wichita or Cleveland.

Is this one of those “follow the money” situations? Are these machines really in the interest of safety? Is that what this is about? Or is it about the corporations who stand to make billions of dollars in their design and deployment? Why not explosives-sniffing dogs instead? Are they not just as effective, and cheaper and friendlier to boot? Or is that the problem?

I’m chatting with the TSA guard about this while he frisks me. He shrugs. “A lot of waste in government,” he says.

“Bag check!” A woman’s voice, loud.

Oh great. Off to the side, the X-ray machine has detected an extremely dangerous 6-ounce bottle of aloe vera gel in my roll-aboard.

“Is this your bag, sir?”

“Um, er, ah, yes.”

She sticks a gloved hand inside and pulls out the tube. The look she gives me — it’s a scolding sort of glare with an unmistakable glint of satisfaction.

“But … but it’s only half-full.”

“I don’t have a scale to weigh liquids, sir.”

“Why do you need a scale? You can just look at it. It’s a 6-once tube and obviously it’s only half-full.”

She doesn’t look. “Sorry. You cannot bring this through.”

“But …”

Plop. She throws my aloe into a waste barrel.

Aha! But in tossing it away like that, hasn’t she just admitted that the container is harmless? After all, if it was something potentially dangerous, you wouldn’t just fling it into the garbage.

Are TSA screeners looking for bombs, or are they looking for innocent liquids? I’m reminded of those tests I’d heard about, when, supposedly, water bottles were attached to mock-up bombs and sent through the X-ray machines. Screeners found the bottles, while the bombs went sailing through. “An Easter egg hunt for minor banned items,” in the words of former TSA chief Kip Hawley, from his upcoming book, “Permanent Emergency.”

“Look,” I say. ” Since you’re throwing that tube away, you’re telling me that you know it’s nothing harmful.”

Perturbed stare.

“So, like … can I have it back?”

She stares at me, clearly annoyed and unable to tell if I’m kidding or not.

I am kidding, of course. My gel is gone for good; another $4.65 into the TSA hole. But am I not correct at the same time? I’ve lost my property, but I feel that I’ve made a useful point and can walk away having established the upper hand. Yeah. I’m proud of my snappy little assessment: so tight, so logical and righteous!  Take that, TSA!

And it’s exactly at this moment, the screener’s eyes still fixed on me, that my cellphone goes slipping out of my hand. I drop it; catch it; drop it and catch it again. My arms are wiggling and flailing in a ridiculous little dance until finally the phone flies completely away from me. It goes clattering off a stack of gray bins and slides pathetically onto the floor — directly at the screener’s feet.

She picks up the phone and hands it to me. “Good day, sir.”

I skulk away feeling like the biggest goofball in the world.

And maybe this was a kind of divine intervention, a dose of humiliation engineered to shut me up and kick me on my way. A lesson summed up in two easy words: lost cause.

If the TSA’s tactical flaws are ever going to be fixed, it certainly won’t be me who gets it done. I spend too much time writing about it, and too much time worrying about it.

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GO-AROUNDS

Re: Airport bookstores, or lack thereof

As various emailers pointed out, not every airport bookshop is a glorified magazine stand. There are still some good retails options in U.S. terminals. Renaissance Books at Milwaukee, for example, got several kudos from readers. There’s Powell’s still at Portland’s PDX, I’m told. I can personally vouch for a place called BookLink (formerly a Borders franchise) at terminal A in Boston. Even JFK’s Terminal 3, for all its demerits, has a decent bookstore just inside the east-side security checkpoint, abeam gates 4 and 5.

And the following letter is from a vice president of Hudson Booksellers, one of the companies mentioned in my story:

Having been a buyer for airport bookstores for over 15 years, I have witnessed the amazing growth and diversification of airport bookselling, as well as the recent downturn, largely due to the e-book effect. Blending customer expectation with personal passion is the essence of our selection process. Yet, so frequently when we see Hudson in print, including in your article, we are pigeonholed as corporate peddlers of “airport books.” Clearly our message and product isn’t getting through the way we’d like.

Airport bookstores are in competition against many other product categories. For the last 15 years my team and I have been turning over every stone in trying to meet the challenge of bringing the best books to the most readers.  One of your reader comments mentioned — incredulously — discovering Roberto Bolaño at the airport in San Francisco. But that type of thing honestly happens every day at Hudson. We’ve sold hundreds of Bolaño’s novels, which are part of our core bookstore selection. You mention Gary Shteyngart, another personal favorite, who we have been promoting since “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook.” We went all out with “Absurdistan” and sold over 26,000 copies the year it came out, which I believe was more than 25 percent of all copies sold. We have many great locations with a locally curated assortment that I would put up against Powell’s or Compass, etc. — in Denver, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Newark, Raleigh.

I am also surprised at your statement about your own book, “Ask the Pilot.” We have carried your book since it came out in 2004, selling over 1,000 copies in one LAX store alone — thousands more over the years — and we are still carrying it in a few locations.

Sara Hinckley
Vice President of Book Purchasing & Promotions
Hudson Booksellers

Author’s note: In retrospect, I ought to have been a little more gracious in my references to Hudson.  Indeed, many of the chain’s airport outlets are full-fledged bookstores with a very good selection, and the chain did stock and sell many copies of my book when it was new. (Though, honestly, the thing is so out-of-date at this point that I’m pleased when I don’t find it for sale.)

This is yet more fodder, of course, for my American Hysteria Hall of Shame.  The hall isn’t limited to airport security foibles, but clearly TSA is gunning for the bronze, the silver and the gold. Operation Cupcake joins a pretty fat list:

TSA confiscates a butter knife from an airline pilot. TSA confiscates a teenage girl’s purse with an embroidered handgun design. TSA confiscates a 4-inch plastic rifle from a GI Joe action doll on the grounds that it’s a “replica weapon.” TSA confiscates a liquid-filled baby rattle from airline pilot’s infant daughter. TSA confiscates a plastic “Star Wars” lightsaber from a toddler.

All of these things really happened. There’s no real need to arrange them in order of ridiculousness, but it’s that last one, with the lightsaber, that really makes you wonder if we haven’t lost our minds. (I mentioned this incident in a column last month, but it deserves another reckoning.) In earthly terms a lightsaber is a toy flashlight covered by a rounded plastic cone. As a “weapon,” though, it is something that exists only in fantasy. The product neither looks like a real weapon nor does it contains part that, by themselves, are TSA contraband. It is an imaginary weapon hazardous only to a race of imaginary space-people invented by George Lucas.

Thus, confiscating a lightsaber is a little like confiscating a genie bottle or a magic wand.

Actually, it’s a lot like confiscating a genie bottle or a magic wand.

And so here we are, having reached a point where truth has become fully and truly stranger than fiction. I challenge anyone to invent a scenario more farcical than those listed above. Come on, give us your best lie. “You won’t believe this, but they actually …” Actually what? What could possibly be more demented than the truth?

And our tax dollars are paying for this, in case you’ve forgotten. To be fair, I don’t disagree that TSA does some useful and effective things. The vast majority of these useful and effective things, however, take place out of view. What we experience on the concourse remains embarrassing and ultimately counterproductive, from cupcake confiscations to the multibillion-dollar scam of those walk-through body scanners.

It could be and should be better. For everyone …

As discussed in my last column,  a program is currently under testing that, if all goes well, will allow pilots to bypass regular TSA screening — a privilege already enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of airport ground workers. Although most of you sympathized with the silliness of pilots being asked to hand over their silverware, remove their belts, etc., not everybody agrees that the best solution is to exempt them entirely. “You sound like an elitist asshole,” submitted one reader. “Making a class of people exempt from idiotic rules only sets them apart and builds resentment,” added another. “As any security expert will tell you, if you’re going to screen at all, you need to screen everybody. The system is only as strong as its weakest link.”

But except for the elitist asshole part, I pretty much agree. Honestly — and I’ve said this before — if security were reasonable and efficient, I would have no problem going through it as a crew member. The only reason I want out is because the existing rules are so foolish, and nobody — neither the airlines, the politicians nor the traveling public — seems interested in fixing them.

In a way, TSA is going about this backward. It’s working to come up with a system to safely exempt pilots, when what it ought to be doing is rationalizing the system for everybody.

Answer: confiscating a fork from a uniformed, on-duty airline pilot.

It happened the other day in Mexico City, at the special crew inspection checkpoint at Benito Juarez International Airport. Yes, I’m dropping the “American” part and changing the name to the “Security Hysteria Hall of Shame,” since, as you’ll see, we are not the only ones who have lost our minds.

I knew there was trouble when the X-ray belt came to a stop and I was asked to open my bag.

The offending item was a fork — one of the small, five-inch kinds more or less identical to those dispensed by airlines in first and business class. Like my long-lost knife, it was part of the silverware pack that I carry in my luggage for those late-night hotel room ramen feasts.

“No, no, no, no,” said the guard. “You cannot take this.”

Really? Let’s ignore for a moment the fact that even the most hell-bent of terrorists isn’t going to get very far with a hand-held weapon of any kind, let alone something as goofy as a fork. The logic in play here is something simpler: Every day, hundreds of thousands of stainless steel forks, not to mention knives, are handed out to passengers in the forward cabins of airplanes. (And why not? The hijacking paradigm exploited on Sept. 11 no longer exists.) Yet on-duty pilots are not allowed to carry them through the checkpoint?

“No, no, no, no.”

“Pero … en el avion … el mismo!” I pleaded, deftly employing five of the 11 words I know in Spanish.

No sale.

And this is the moment when I expected the camera to appear. It was all a joke, right? The guard would break out laughing and slap me on the shoulder. “Estoy jugando, señor! Yo vi su artículo en Salon!”

Instead I got a “Sorry, sir,” and a kind of shrug-wince. For what it mattered, his expression was sympathetic, and I could tell that he understood. He knew the rule was a silly one (I mean, how could he not?). He wanted to make an exception, but was powerless — or afraid — to do so.

This is the lunatic world of security we now live in: one of blind adherence, stripped of reason and logic, in which even the stupidest policies are enforced to the letter of the law.

It gets worse. Together with my fork was a plastic picnic knife — my sad replacement for the metal one taken by TSA. This too was of concern. At one point the supervisor carefully ran his fingers across its deadly serrations, mumbling instructionally to his colleague.

The picnic knife was given the all-clear and returned to me. The fork, though, would be tossed into a bin, carted off to wherever it is that airport security brings its troves of pilfered property. (I propose these raw materials be melted down and used to build new terminals, each with a majestic fountain in the center bubbling with recycled soft drinks, shampoo and mouthwash.)

And so everybody was that much safer.

There’s that expression: “You can’t make this up.” Well, really, you can’t. My head spins and my bones ache just writing about it.

Like I said, we’re not the only ones who’ve gone off the security deep end. I’ve encountered similar nonsense in Thailand, Nicaragua, the U.K.

In the meantime, did you catch the front-page New York Times story about the drug-smuggling and theft ring broken up at Kennedy Airport in New York? Apparently dozens of American Airlines luggage handlers were involved in a years-long operation in which they stole from passengers’ suitcases and smuggled cocaine in aircraft cargo holds. They would, in some cases, hide the drugs behind the sidewall panels of the lower-deck compartments.

Baggage handlers, by the way, do not have to pass through airport security. Not before 9/11, and not since. They, like almost all tarmac workers, are subject only to occasional, random TSA checks.

I realize that the vast majority of airport ground staff are honest employees and not criminals or terrorists. I’m not suggesting that they, too, be required to hand over their forks. That’s not the point, pardon the pun. It’s not that they aren’t patted down and X-rayed and relieved of their pointy things, it’s that pilots (and flight attendants) are.

Could there be a more demented double standard? It basically nullifies everything we’ve been asked to believe about the supposed importance of screening airline crew members. And no offense to the hardworking baggage handlers, fuelers, caterers, cabin cleaners and mechanics out there, but who is the higher-risk employee from a security perspective, a tarmac worker or a pilot? I suppose anything is possible, but let’s be realistic. If we’re going to screen at all, can we at least do it rationally?

As we speak, a program is being tested that, assuming all goes well, will eventually allow on-duty pilots to bypass the normal checkpoint. It’s a simple enough process that confirms a pilot’s identity by matching up airline and government-issue credentials with information stored in a database. That it took 10 years and counting for this to happen, however, is absurd.

I know this comes across as a self-serving complaint, but ultimately this isn’t about pilots. It’s about how diseased our approach to security is overall. A system that is stupid enough to devote valuable time and resources relieving pilots of tableware isn’t just an unfair one, but a potentially dangerous and self-defeating one.

And I needn’t be reminded of the indignities endured by passengers. What’s further unfortunate about the incident down at Benito Juarez is that it steals the thunder of a reader named Stacey Goldring, who shared with me a story of such sublime brainlessness that, until I lost my fork, was ready to take top honors in my Hall of Shame.

One day, flying from Dallas to Jacksonville, Fla., Goldring and her toddler son were refused passage through the TSA checkpoint because they boy was carrying … get ready now … his Star Wars lightsaber. A lightsaber, if you’re not familiar, is a flashlight with a plastic cone attached — or, perhaps more to the point, a toy in the shape of a make-believe weapon from a galaxy, and a line of reasoning, far, far away.

“I believe it was green,” says Goldring, “indicating my son’s future Jedi path. We were told by the TSA professionals that the saber, which technically is something that does not exist, was a weapon. We were escorted out of security and sent to the ticket counter, where I had to fill out paperwork in order to check the lightsaber in as baggage.”

That might have the fork story beat, actually.

Like I said, you can’t make this up.

The saddest part is that few people seem to care. We grumble, we gripe, and sometimes we laugh, but there is little if any organized push to change this madness, neither by citizens nor their elected leaders. In the end, we get what we deserve.

As for me and my silverware, my patience can’t bear these episodes anymore. I think I’m switching to chopsticks.

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Congrats to Jerry Aubin, of Austin, Texas, for winning last week’s Hüsker Dü trivia contest.

The questions was this: There is a mistake in the liner notes to the “Zen Arcade” album. What is it?

“Who ever wrote the song sings it,” it says among the credits, “except for ‘Somewhere,’ which Grant wrote the words for.” This doesn’t make sense, as Grant has the vocals on that song.

Not even Paul Hilcoff, host of the mind-bendingly thorough Hüsker Dü archive site, knew the answer offhand.

Aubin gets one of the last remaining Ask the Pilot baseball caps, autographed ballplayer-style under the brim. I have one or two left, as well as a handful of small and medium-size T-shirts. My pre-holiday clearance sale is on: your choice for $10, including shipping.

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Do you have questions for Salon’s aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his website and look for answers in a future column.

That’s right, embroidered. According to reports, 17-year-old Virginia Gibbs was told by Transportation Security Administration that bringing such a purse through the checkpoint constitutes a federal offense. She was given the option of giving up the purse or sending it along as checked luggage.

TSA says the problem is that such designs can be mistaken by scanners for the real thing, resulting in checkpoint closures and delays. On the one hand that is not unreasonable (though it does make us think that if you can’t tell the difference between a purse and a gun, how good is this technology at identifying explosives?). On the other, more logical hand, once they saw and realized it was a purse, what would the harm have been in giving it back to the girl and letting her through? If there was going to be a closure or a delay, it already happened. Confiscating the bag no longer served a purpose.

A ban on replica weapons makes sense. We get it. But this wasn’t a replica weapon. It was a purse. There is nothing remotely dangerous about what is essentially a drawing of a firearm, and TSA should not be able to deny the carriage of harmless private property.

Meanwhile, what bothers me about the CNN.com story is that it implies this is all OK. “Flying fashionistas with a thing for the Second Amendment,” it begins, “may want to leave their gun-themed purses and other paraphernalia at home, lest they be flagged as a security risk and miss their flights.” Rather than worrying about the Second Amendment, where is the more urgent concern over security run amok? And things like this aren’t just silly or intrusive. They waste time, they waste money and they draw valuable security resources away from more useful deployment. In other words, they’re making us less safe, not more safe.

I think the time has come to put together what I’m calling the American Hysteria Hall of Shame, a compilation of our more ludicrous overreactions since the terror attacks of 2001. It’s hard to say which incident belongs at the top. Up there with Danger Purse is the story of the pilot and the butter knife, and the one about the 57-year-old man who accidentally walked through an emergency exit door at Kennedy Airport, causing the entire terminal to be evacuated and getting himself arrested.

And let’s not forget my personal favorite, Operation Barf Bag: In 2004, on board a United Airlines 747 flying from Sydney to Los Angeles, a discarded airsickness bag was found in a lavatory with the letters “BOB” scrawled across it. For reasons that defy explanation, somebody decided that the letters stood for “Bomb On Board,” and the plane went all the way back to Sydney for a precautionary landing, jettisoning thousands of gallons of fuel in the process. Never mind that there was no precedent to suspect “BOB” referred to anything aside from a person’s name; we were asked to believe that terrorists would actually advertise the imminent detonation of an explosive device by means of a cryptic acronym scrawled on a barf bag.

Our Hall of Shame needs a logo too. I’m imagining an intoxicated eagle clutching a shredded Bill of Rights — half in its beak, the other half in its talons — above some frightened-looking Americans draped with a flag. At the bottom it should have some words — a motto. How do you say, “The Terrorists Have Won” in Latin?

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Thanks for bearing with me through last week’s Hüsker Dü column. Most of the feedback I received was positive.

To those of you who complained and who don’t enjoy my music diversions, stop provoking me or you’re going to get more of them. How would you like a five-screen story on the Jazz Butcher Conspiracy, or an article called “Fifty Reasons Why Billy Bragg Was Better Than Bob Dylan.” Don’t make me do it!

And one small sequel to the whole Hüsker Dü thing, which I meant to include with last week’s column. It’s a contest, actually.

Here’s the question: The liner notes to the “Zen Arcade” album contain a mistake. What is it?

The first emailer with the correct answer gets his or her choice of an Ask the Pilot baseball cap (autographed under the brim, MLB player-style), or one of my few remaining ATP T-shirts (so long as you can fit into a size small or medium, since that’s all I’ve got left).

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Do you have questions for Salon’s aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his website and look for answers in a future column.

What makes Malaysia Airlines’ swoosh so tragic is that it supersedes one of the classiest palettes out there. Malaysia is, or was, one of the few carriers to retain a classic “cheat line” — the horizontal, nose-to-tail striping once very common on jetliners. The blue and red cheat, tapered at the stern, was handsome, distinctive and dignified — exactly what a livery should be.

The only thing that saves the revised look from total abomination is the retention of the indigenous Wau kite on the tail.  Few airline logos are as iconic and long-lasting.

True story: In 1993 I was in the city of Kota Bahru, a conservative Islamic town in northern Malaysia close to the Thai border, when we saw a group of little kids flying Wau kites. At the time I didn’t realize where the airline’s logo had come from, but I recognized the pattern immediately. It was one of those airline/culture crossover moments that we aerophiles get all emotional over.

Indonesian carrier Garuda, on the other hand, has taken a tragic step backward by removing a similarly iconic logo from its tails. Gone is the abstract head of the Garuda eagle. Borrowed from ancient Sanskrit, the Garuda is common to Buddhist and Hindu mythology, and one of Hinduism’s animal-god trinity. This was seen as too meaningful, apparently, and the airline switched instead to this idiotic blue blur. 

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Here was another of my favorite airline/culture crossover moments — or maybe airline/geopolitics is more accurate:

A few months ago I was excited to spot an Iran Air 747SP on the apron at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok. The SP, or “special performance,” 747 was a short-bodied, long-range variant developed in the mid-1970s for Pan Am. Few were built, and today an SP is a rare sight. Only three or four remain in revenue airline service — all at Iran Air.

But what really made the scene interesting is that parked directly next to the Iran Air jet was an El Al 767. There were Israel and Iran, all cozy together at a remote parking stand in BKK.

Is it crazy to wonder if maybe the airport hadn’t devised this parking arrangement on purpose? 

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GO-AROUNDS 

Re: “Pan Am” the series

I wish you would have watched it. Somebody with a professional background needs to point out all the historical gaffes. How about Pan Am assigning a novice captain, at least 10 to 15 years too young, and with a shag haircut, to the inaugural NYC-Paris flight. Is there not a seniority system for pilots? This kind of indifference to “minor” historical detail — like Civil War soldiers smoking filter cigarettes — just reveals a lack of seriousness to the whole enterprise. Its success will depend on the ignorance of its audience.

Richard Travis, Tallahassee, Fla. 

I held my nose and watched the first episode along with my wife, who was a TWA “stewardess” for a short time. Having worked on the set of several aviation-related TV shows and motion pictures as a technical advisor, I knew I was going to be disappointed. Production companies rarely listen to TAs, even though they pay good money for us to be there.

The cockpit scenes are painful for anyone who has even a slight knowledge of aviation, especially an airline pilot from that era. The sad-looking Pan Am pilots look and act nothing remotely close to the real ones. A kid who looks like a student pilot is playing the role of 707 captain! Otherwise the inaccuracies are too many to mention. Not one scene came close to accurately portraying an actual 707, its crew or operation.

Captain Ross “Rusty” Aimer 

Author’s note: It’s exactly for reasons like these that I didn’t watch the show, and that I similarly avoid almost all aviation-related shows and movies, and many documentaries as well. A junior captain assigned to the inaugural 707 to Paris? Not bloody likely. Chances are it would have been an old salt management captain (a chief pilot or whatnot). The whole crew, I’m sure, would have been high-profile. Incidentally, Pan Am launched the first-ever jet service between Idlewild (as JFK was known at the time) and Paris in October 1958. I thought the show was set in ’63. If you’re going to build your program around the name and legacy of an actual airline, at least be close with the facts. 

Re: Bag check!  

Notwithstanding the low percentage of likelihood that there actually is an explosive in that bag, virtually every bomb squad’s protocols begin with “DO NOT TOUCH OR MOVE ANYTHING” until the possible threat has been professionally evaluated. Your position, and that of many commenters, seems to accept that it’s OK to jostle and poke at a possible bomb.

– Art Kosatka 

Author’s note: I assumed this was the justification for stopping the line. But the bag has already been jostled and poked at all the way to the airport, up onto the belt, etc. You’d merely be moving it out of the way while somebody off to the side takes a look at the image. And let’s face it, this is an incredible long shot over which to inconvenience millions of travelers daily. Get the bag out of there and keep the line moving.

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Do you have questions for Salon’s aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his website and look for answers in a future column.