Clipper Class

Clipper Class
A pair of nail scissors and a one-way ticket to airport-security hell.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, October 25, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

Flying around America had its frustrating moments even before this season of anxiety. That's a fact familiar to anyone who has ever gone through such rituals as spending the first two hours of a 40-minute flight sitting in a takeoff queue at New York's overworked LaGuardia Airport or Chicago's "weather"-prone O'Hare.

But right now, anyone who tells you that life is a journey and not a destination sure isn't kidding.

We are all trying to fly safe. Blame for what now ails aviation falls fundamentally on Osama bin Laden and all who help him and his kind. But maybe we need to get a little smarter about what provides security at the airport and what provides mostly sound, fury and misery .

Running the airline gauntlet can turn into a protracted private struggle, as you arrive the now-prescribed two hours early to inch through long domestic check-in lines that seem designed to enhance security mainly by offering incentives for attrition. That's not as smart as, say, your average local deli, which figured out years ago that if you must keep people waiting in line, you might as well let them take a number and go browse the potato-chip racks.

You tell yourself, as you lurch forward with your luggage one step at a time along the check-in line switchbacks, that the new procedures are for the good of us all. This is a season for patience. But some private voice keeps telling you that when every domestic trip feels like transiting Bolivia, something is haywire.

Maybe it was the moment last week when an airport security guard reached deep into my carry-on bag and triumphantly seized my miniscule manicure scissors. I am not sure what maneuver they would expect anyone to perform with these diminutive and flimsy objects. It might make more sense had the guard also seized the longer, stronger, sharper and far more dangerous metal nail file I was carrying in the same little cosmetics kit. But this they missed, and until I unpacked two flights later, I hadn't even thought of it.

OK, if it helps my country, I'll gladly give up my nail scissors. But what really got my attention by the time I'd finished taking three commercial flights this past week was that I seemed suddenly to have acquired the profile of a suspect terrorist. The first time, I thought it was random--what is there about a 46-year-old, 5-foot-4, blue-eyed American woman, apart from perhaps the occasional horrors of my upstate New York accent--that would set off alarms? Yet I was handed a boarding pass and told the computer had "selected" me to have my luggage searched.

A cheerful fellow wearing blue plastic gloves squeezed, unfolded and scrutinized every item in my suitcase. He told me his job has its entertaining moments, though it sounded as if the passengers found them more embarrassing than amusing. Apparently, Americans have not yet fully caught on to the idea that their baggage may be examined item by item in public, in front of a large audience of otherwise bored fellow travelers.

"It's even better than TV," this suitcase-checker told me--a reference, I assume, to the recent spate of bare-all reality shows. When he'd finished re-packing my bag, I pointed out that someone else had left a pair of folded white gym socks on the counter. He asked me if I wanted them.

Not really.

I went on through the usual X-ray and metal-detector check, got to the gate and was pulled aside for a second item-by-item search of my carry-on bag. So it went again the next day, when I flew from JFK to San Francisco. Across my boarding pass the ticket agent scrawled a big black mark that clearly made me special. At the gate, while some folks walked right onto the plane, I was shunted aside to wait with other suspicious types for yet another search (which again missed the nail file) and pat-down. Was I there so it would look less like "profiling" if they pulled aside any muscular bearded foreigners?

By the third flight, this time with a red star stamped on my boarding pass, I knew what was coming--though for all the waiting, ransacking, searching and patting, they once again missed the nail file. Privately I went through a checklist of my possible sins. Had I hesitated too long in answering the ritual questions at the counter about whether I had packed my own bags? Had I erred in showing a U.S. passport instead of a more mundane driver's license as an ID?

Finally I realized that what had almost surely triggered the black mark was that for each leg of the flight I had bought a one-way ticket, something that turned out last month to have been a hijacker trademark. OK. So I guess we are now girding for hijackers savvy enough to hijack a plane using nail scissors, but too clueless buy a round trip?

What's mainly making us safer in the air right now is not the furor at the boarding gates. It's that American air travelers, knowing what they now do, would most likely respond to any threat on board by tearing the hijackers apart. One of my brothers, who flew from New Orleans to Prague in mid-September, sent an e-mail before he left explaining that he had mapped out a plan in case the plane was hijacked. He would resurrect the old high-school wrestling "chicken-wing" maneuver to attack the terrorists. He had been practicing flying on his home-computer simulator; having retaken the cockpit, he would head for a place that would allow maximum room for error in trying to land the aircraft safely--such as the great salt flats of Utah.

He added, "Seriously, though, if there is any funny business, I will be one of the ones rushing the terrorists. I just can't see any point in sitting and waiting to go." In recent weeks, I have heard similar notions from quite a number of travelers, especially men. I am proud of them, but also hope that while actually in the air, anyone this edgy will go easy on the coffee.

It all gets even more confusing when you come across reports such as the Associated Press story that a man in New Orleans boarded a plane Tuesday with a loaded gun in his briefcase, an object the gate guards apparently missed, and the man himself says he forgot about until after takeoff--at which point he turned the gun over to a flight attendant. Upon arrival, he was interrogated and released by the FBI. Maybe they would have caught up with him sooner if he'd had a pair of nail scissors.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."