The seconds tick by as the guard waits for his colleague. One minute passes. Then two. Then three. All the while, the line behind you grows longer.

“BAG CHECK!”

Eventually a supervisor ambles over. There’s a conference. For some reason these situations require a sort of football huddle, with lots of whispering and pointing, before finally things get moving again. At last the bag is either sent on its way, or removed for a closer, hands-on inspection.

The obvious question: Is there a reason the offending piece of luggage can’t simply be pulled from the machine and screened separately — on a table behind or to one side of the main platform? The screener could archive the scan if need be, and the belt and the line could keep moving.

Let’s say the average “bag check” takes 90 seconds to resolve, and there is one every 12 minutes. (In my own experience they seem to happen more frequently, but let’s be conservative.) That’s a minimum of seven and a half minutes of non-movement per hour, per security line. Keep doing the math, and you’ll come up with some preposterous amount of collective wasted time.

The other night I endured a particularly lengthy bag check. The luggage in question was mine. I was on duty, in my uniform, which made things embarrassing enough in the first place. But when I asked for answers, it only got worse.

“BAG CHECK!” called the woman at the monitor, switching off the belt. She then proceeded to sit there, doing absolutely nothing, for the next five minutes.

“I think that’s mine,” I said, my black roll-aboard now captive in the metal cave only a few feet away. “What is it you’re looking at?”

A head shake was her only response.

“How come,” I asked, “when this happens, can’t you just pull out the bag and hold it aside, so that the line doesn’t have to stop?”

“Because these are the rules.”

“OK. But wouldn’t it be better to keep things moving? The bag wouldn’t be going anywhere, and neither would I …”

Louder voice this time, her eyes widening: “These are the rules! Do not argue, sir!”

Right, great discussion there. Thanks for the explanation.

Another concourse screener I spoke with says this protocol varies location to location. “It doesn’t happen that way at my airport,” he told me. “I can remove a bag, then review the archived scan with another officer.”

I’ll take his word for it, though I can’t recall seeing this at any of the airports I frequently pass through.

I’ve also been told that TSA supervisors occasionally establish their own “local” rules as to how bag checks are handled. This is not official policy, but it’s known to happen. Or it might be that a particular airport has had a history of breaches and is trying to run an extra-tight ship.

Well, all right, but that still doesn’t explain why the line has to stop.

“TSA’s priority is to provide the best possible security in the most efficient way,” said a TSA official. There is a valid reason a bag can’t be moved and put aside, the official assured me, but was unable to divulge further particulars.

Such assurances notwithstanding, I fail to see how moving a bag 5 feet to one side would have any effect on the thoroughness of the screening itself. What am I missing?

In the big picture, no, an extra few minutes’ wait is not an unreasonable price to pay if it helps reduce the likelihood of a bomb being smuggled onto a plane. But neither is it necessary, and in that same big picture we’re talking about millions of wasted minutes.

Then again, 10 long years after the TSA was created, much about the average checkpoint still has a juryrigged feel: the tottering piles of bins, the X-ray belts that are twice as high as they need to be, the bottleneck collection points, etc. Thorough the checkpoints might be, but are they really efficient?

As I’ve advocated many times in this column, the ideal course of action would be an overhaul of our entire approach to concourse security, shifting to a focus on passengers themselves rather than on their belongings. TSA, in fact, concurs, and rumblings are that it will tailor its approach accordingly over time. And the agency, I’m obliged to concede, isn’t quite the dysfunctional demon some of us — ahem — routinely make it out to be. I have spoken to plenty of bright, resourceful people at TSA who know a lot more about the challenges of safeguarding an airport than I ever will.

But, for the time being, assuming we’re stuck with the self-defeating strategy that treats every last person who flies, from crew member to infant, as an equal threat, and insists on marching those people through an overly tedious screening process, can we at least rejigger the hardware and employ some common sense? A few simple tweaks would go a long way toward a smoother, faster, less frustrating experience.

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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.

But I wish, as a country, that we were past this.

It’s not the anniversary itself that irks me. The 10-year mark is — or should be — worthy of our solemn respects and a national timeout. But commemorating the attacks would feel a lot more meaningful if, in fact, we had ever stopped commemorating them. Our healing process has been never-ending — occasionally introspective and edifying, but all too often maudlin and suffocating.

Maybe that’s a terrible and insensitive thing to say, I don’t know.

But the attacks were supposed to have made us a better and stronger country, not merely a more sentimental one whose most endearing qualities are a penchant for self-pity and a hunger for revenge. And about the worst thing we can do right now is focus too intensely on an event that, let’s be honest now, not only killed 3,000 Americans, but that directly or indirectly inspired a pathology of disastrous and very expensive decisions.

Wait, where am I going with this? Well, my expertise, my columnly duty, is all things air travel. And among those lousy decisions, of course, was the dystopian nightmare/comedy known as the Transportation Security Administration. Any conversation as to how the world of air travel has been affected by the attacks of 2001 must begin and end with the TSA.

The tragic irony being that the success of the 2001 conspiracy had nothing to do with airport security in the first place. This was a failure of intelligence at the FBI and CIA levels, not at the concourse checkpoint. As I’ve pointed out many times in the past, the hijackers were not exploiting a weakness in airport security, but rather a weakness in our mind-set — our presumptions, based on years of precedent, as to what a hijacking was, and how it would unfold. What weapons the men used was irrelevant. Ballpoint pens would have sufficed, for the strategy relied not on hardware, but on the element of surprise. So long as the hijackers didn’t chicken out, their plan was all but guaranteed to succeed.

I will otherwise spare my regular readers any further rehashing as to what, since then, has made our airport security apparatus so farcical and ineffective. The topic has granted more than ample coverage in this column over the past eight years. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the points are neatly summarized here.

But what else? Setting aside the troubling legacy of TSA, how else has flying changed?

Granted, the airline industry is vastly different today than it was in 2001: We’ve seen four major carrier bankruptcies, the liquidation of several others, and two giant mergers. Tens of thousands of industry employees lost their jobs; the rest have suffered huge concessions in wages and benefits. Today the U.S. domestic market is all but dominated by low-cost carriers and/or regional planes operated on behalf of the majors by their various code-share affiliates. Regionals now account for an astonishing 50 percent of all domestic flights. Fares are cheaper than they were a decade ago, but service levels have fallen and delays are up.

That’s a lot of change. Drawing a straight line to 9/11, however, isn’t so easy. In 2001, the so-called legacy airlines already were creaking and groaning under mounting financial pressures; low-cost carriers, anchored by Southwest and a feisty New York upstart called JetBlue, had the legacies back on their heels; the regional sector was expanding rapidly.

The attacks were a powerful catalyst that thrust the industry into a down cycle the likes of which it had never seen. But it can easily be argued that these changes were coming anyway. They merely came faster.

In weathering this crazy storm, the industry was supposed to have learned something. It has certainly reinvented itself, but have the biggest players really worked out a plan for long-term survival? Are they any less vulnerable to the calamitous boom/bust cycles of years past? Have the variables of pricing and capacity been rationally balanced? Sure, flying is cheap, and, sure, it’s remarkably safe. On the one hand we can hardly ask for more. But is the system healthy? How will it weather the next 9/11, the next fuel crisis, the next recession? And is it the system passengers deserve?

I’m not so sure.

Neither am I sure of what, as a nation, the big takeaway from 9/11 ought to be. One thing, certainly — and this gets back to security, as it always does — should be a heightened sense of vigilance. Not in the martial, “see something, say something” sense that security zealots love to force down our throats, but in the sense of the famous Wendell Phillips quote. Google it if you have to.

Try as we might, we can never fully protected ourselves from external threats — not our airports, not our seaports, not our shopping malls, power plants, water supplies and so on. Pouring billions upon billions of dollars into the maw of the Security Industrial Complex, as I like to call it — more cameras, fences, more weapons and high-tech surveillance — does not necessarily make us safer. But it does put our liberties in peril, and it does make certain people, and certain industries, very, very wealthy. Follow the money, as they say. Airport security is a useful example of the greater legacy of 9/11: Its advertised effectiveness is minimal, yet it carries on with a huge budget and a lack of accountability. The public, meanwhile, more or less accepts this. As it did the Iraq war, et al.

As I see it, the real danger to the country isn’t coming from the caves of Central Asia, but from our own stout refusal to act rationally, together with a willingness to accept almost anything in the name of security.

That’s a terrible way to end a commemorative 9/11 piece, but it’s also an unfortunate course for a country like ours to take. Perhaps a splash of cold water, not another candlelight vigil, is really what we need. In the long run, a healthier, more dignified democracy is about the best tribute we could offer to those who perished 10 years ago.

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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.

3. Terrifying Twitter of the day: Courtney Stodden, the child (but not childlike) bride of 51-year-old Doug Hutchison, continues to prove her classiness online with updates like this:

You know what? I’m starting to feel bad for Doug Hutchison, creepy old guy that he is.

4. Empty threat of the day: “Gossip Girl’s” Taylor Momsen has quit acting, “hopefully for the rest of (her) life.” Of course, in order for this to be a legitimate news story, we’d have to have some evidence that Momsen ever participated in any sort of “acting” in the first place.

5. Registered TSA complaint today: Another one to add to the pile: The New York Times reports on the alleged rise of African-American women being targeted by airport security for hair pat-downs.

First Officer Jamie? The sound of it made me wince.

I realize this is in keeping with JetBlue’s casual and quirky verve, but it strikes me as a little too “lite.” It’s a touch unprofessional, if not goofy. And while maybe I’m being too sensitive, it slyly reinforces the notion that the pilot’s job — and his professional identity along with it — is no longer terribly important. As my regular readers are well aware, few things get under my skin more than myths about cockpit automation. First Officer Jamie? Well, whatever. After all, isn’t the plane just “flying itself by computer”?

The “assisted by” part makes it even worse, preying on one of my other pet peeves. The implication being that first officers, aka copilots, are mere apprentices and not full-fledged pilots.

“Jamie, I’m gonna go ahead and let you put the landing gear down. Just be careful now.”

“Yes sir!”

If I were a JetBlue pilot, particularly a first officer, I’d be a little embarrassed, and maybe a little insulted. 

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Latest From the Department of You Can’t Make This Up …

The Federal Aviation Administration wants to regulate the use of remote-controlled model airplanes. They call these toys — get ready now — “Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems,” also known as “SUAS.”

Naturally, if the FAA has hold of something, it requires some needless acronym. Perhaps, in this case, that makes the “threat” seem more real?

And so maybe you’re a 40-something RC enthusiast, and that’s fine. But let’s face it, that’s what these things are: toys.

Maybe the feds should regulate paper airplanes too? 

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Thespian Security Administration …

In my opinion, the rudest and most confrontational TSA guards are those at New York’s Kennedy International Airport. There is one guy at Kennedy, though, who seems to have a good sense of humor. He gets my coveted Transportation Security Officer of the Month award (my in box welcomes other nominees).

One day I was going through the checkpoint, and I saw that he had assembled a display — a little altar of sorts — of confiscated water bottles and soda cans on the floor next to the X-ray machine. When he saw me giving it a look, he smiled. “Well,” he said, “if we’re going to have security theater, we ought to have some props to go with it.”

Several passengers broke out laughing.

They should hire more people like him. 

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Looking Out …

Speaking of JFK, chances are you heard about the incident at Kennedy earlier this week. On Monday afternoon a Lufthansa Airbus A340 aborted its takeoff after a taxiing EgyptAir 777, which had been instructed to remain clear of the runway, mistakenly crossed the “hold short” boundary. This wasn’t the near miss that some have hyped; the Lufthansa crew stopped well short of the EgyptAir plane, which itself came to a stop before actually entering the runway. Still, any deviation from a “hold short” clearance is serious. A nod to Chris Hawley of the Associated Press for this levelheaded, non-sensationalized account.

On the bright, if ironic side, the FAA reports that runway incursions overall have fallen by an astounding 90 percent since 2001. Credit goes to better training, improved runway and taxiway markings, and overall crew awareness of the issue. Airports are busier and more congested than ever before, and ground collision hazards have been a hot-button issue for some time. I once devoted a column to the issue, here.  The attention seems to have paid off. 

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Call Me an Apologist …

The media has been reporting how U.S. airlines raked in over $5.5 billion last year in extra service fees. That is, the supplemental charges for luggage, food, itinerary changes and so forth that everybody loathes so much.

That’s a lot of money, but the stories have been disingenuous for not bothering to mention that the average airfare remains at or near 1980s levels.

People feel nickel-and-dimed by supplemental fees, but they help keep fares down by allowing people who desire certain extras — those wishing to check a bag, make a reservations change, buy an on-board snack, etc. — to absorb a higher share of the cost. Those who don’t want such things don’t have to buy them.

Sure, these items used to be included in the ticket price. And that ticket price used to be higher. Airlines are easy to pick on, and there’s plenty of room for improvement, but the fact is that flying remains affordable, mostly reliable (over 80 percent of flights arrive on-time or better) and astonishingly safe. 

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Heroes Never Die … 

Capt. Sullenberger’s “Miracle on the Hudson” Airbus A320 is back in the news. The jet recently completed its final journey — by flatbed trailer, sans wings — from a warehouse in New Jersey to a museum — a museum! — in North Carolina.

This is the latest and hopefully the closing chapter in the most overhyped and misrepresented air crash story of all time. 

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Culture and Music …

I’ve been noticing a curiously large number of young urbanites sporting handlebar mustaches lately.

A couple of weeks ago at the Davis Square subway station here in Somerville, Mass., I found myself standing alongside two 20-something hipster dudes, both of whom wore meticulously waxed handlebars. “Hey, um, excuse me,” I said. And I asked if they knew who Greg Norton was.

Neither had any idea who I was talking about, at which point I realized that I despise this silly new trend.

And if you too have no idea who Greg Norton is, please, do not grow yourself a handlebar mustache. You don’t deserve one.

Google it. Or just look at this picture.

Which reminds me:

I always thought I should be the one to write the official Hüsker Dü biography. But Michael Azzerrad has beat me to it, sort of, having just published “See a Little Light,” the biography of former HD guitarist and co-vocalist Bob Mould.

I haven’t got a copy yet. I expect that Bob devotes several pages of nostalgic reminiscence to the time I played frisbee with him in the summer of 1984. (The game ended when I accidentally stepped on the frisbee and cracked it in half.)

“See a Little Light” is the name of a song from Mould’s “Workbook” album — his first post-Hüsker solo project, released in 1989. It’s an OK song from an OK album, though not remotely on a par with Mould’s earlier output.

Michael Azzerrad is also the author of “Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991″ — the definitive memoir/account of the salad days of the U.S. independent rock scene.

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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.

The second thing is that Pittsburgh airport is one of the trial spots for so-called CrewPASS. Now under testing at a handful of airports, CrewPASS uses a database to cross-check an airline pilot’s company and Federal Aviation Administration credentials, and will eventually allow all on-duty crew members to bypass Transportation Security Administration checkpoints nationwide.

That pilots are currently forced to undergo the same TSA inspections as passengers has long been a sore point of mine. It wastes the crew members’ time and it wastes the passengers’ time, while doing virtually nothing to enhance safety. And it wouldn’t be quite so preposterous if not for the fact that other airport workers, many with full access to aircraft, have long been exempt from standard TSA screening. Mechanics are not screened. Caterers are not screened. Cabin cleaners are not screened. Baggage loaders and apron workers are not screened. They are subject to fingerprinting, a 10-year criminal background investigation and cross-checking against terror watch lists, but they receive only occasional, random on-the-job checks. Many employees say they have gone years without ever once being screened.

As a uniformed, on-duty first officer, meanwhile, I am not allowed to carry a serrated butter knife onto my aircraft.

CrewPASS has been sitting in a kind of limbo for over two years, and how long it might take for full implementation is anybody’s guess. The problem, mainly, has been one of money. The government feels it shouldn’t have to pay for it; the airlines feel they shouldn’t have to pay for it; pilots feel they shouldn’t have to pay for it. But I’m not sure that I understand. We’re told the program will require millions of dollars in manpower, hardware and software. Yet TSA and the industry long ago agreed on a simple and inexpensive way to pre-clear these tens of thousands of other workers. Why is it different for pilots?

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 My experience with Pittsburgh’s CrewPASS trial was enough to make me want to bid Pittsburgh trips for the rest of my career. It was so pleasant, efficient and sensible.

Sadly, however, while the guard was verifying my status, I looked back over my shoulder at what lay in store for the rest of the flying public. The security line was enormous — hundreds of people waiting impatiently to be victimized by TSA’s wasteful and intrusive screening, scanning, X-raying and patting down — lest a child or senior citizen sneak onto a plane with a 4-ounce tube of toothpaste or a pair of sewing scissors. This, even more so than any crew member policies, is the real madness of airport security.

Is there a glimmer of hope here too? Two weeks ago, at its 67th General Meeting in Singapore, the International Air Transport Association unveiled a mock-up of its “security checkpoint of the future.”

The IATA proposal, covered in this column a few months ago, wouldn’t be a perfect solution, but it’s arguably the best idea I’ve yet heard with respect to restoring sanity to airport security. Basically it categorizes each passenger into one of three risk groups, each with its own security line. Those in the first line would receive little more than a cursory inspection, while those (presumably far fewer) in the third line would be subject to an enhanced-level check similar to existing TSA procedures.

Biometric data will be checked against a stored profile, and against passenger watch lists, to help determine which of the three lines a traveler is assigned to.

Sure, it’s profiling. But it’s a form of profiling that takes in more than simple ethnicity or nationality. And regardless of what one thinks of profiling in general, it is imperative that we break from the mad and self-defeating approach in which every last person who flies, from an infant to a uniformed captain, is an equal threat worthy of equal scrutiny.

“Today’s checkpoint was designed four decades ago to stop hijackers carrying metal weapons,” said Giovanni Bisignani, director general of IATA. “We need a process that responds to today’s threat. It must amalgamate intelligence based on passenger information and new technology. That means moving from a system that looks for bad objects, to one that can find bad people.”

It’s a great idea, but sadly it’s a long way off. And while it might be welcomed in Europe and the rest of the world, we cynics expect strong resistance from TSA. Not because TSA feels it’s a bad idea, per se, but because the IATA plan diametrically opposes much of what TSA does, and would require TSA to relinquish a good deal of its power and control. TSA is essentially in the business of search and seizure — of stripping people down, literally and figuratively, and confiscating their hardware. IATA’s strategy is based primarily on the gathering and interpreting of intelligence.

We’ll see what happens.

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 In the meantime, though, it’s oddly reassuring to remind ourselves that despite what whiners like me often lead the public to believe, American airports do not, it turns out, hold a monopoly when it comes to lunatic and irrational security policies. For example:

I was traveling home from Asia a few weeks ago when — and this is the second time this has happened to me — I was asked to pack my liquids and gels in a zip-top plastic bag after clearing security.

I’d passed through the metal detector and X-ray machine with no trouble. But then, at the departure gate, security staff had set up a secondary screening station — a common protocol for flights headed to the U.S. from foreign cities. Passengers were asked to haul their bags onto a metal table. Guards then opened the bags and rummaged through them, looking for who knows what.

One of the guards unzipped my toiletries kit. Inside were my various containers — toothpaste, shaving gel and so forth. All were legally sized at 100 milliliters or less, but alas not encased in a clear plastic baggie. This was perfectly acceptable for the X-ray screeners, but, inexplicably, not for the secondary check.

“These need to go in a plastic bag,” said the checker. She had a stack of zipper bags there at the ready. She handed me one, and watched intently as I placed each item inside. She nodded thanks, and I tucked the toiletries kit back into my suitcase.

The ridiculousness of this exercise ought to be obvious to anyone. The intent of having people bag their liquids and gels is to make it easier for the screeners at the X-ray station to scrutinize them. There is no point or purpose in having them bagged after you’ve cleared the checkpoint and are sitting on board the aircraft. After all, there is no rule against a passenger opening a zip-lock bag and using its contents any time he or she sees fit. Otherwise your toiletries would be confiscated from you entirely.

After wasting five minutes of my and everyone else’s time, I was free to pick up my luggage, take 10 steps to my right, open the bag again, and dump everything back into the kit the way it was in the first place.

This is more than just silly. The money and resources spent on meaningless rigmarole could instead be deployed in the interest of actual security. Instead of paying people to hunt for plastic bags, they could be paid for the hunting of explosives, say, or, as IATA reminds us, for the people who might use them.