Sunday, January 17, 2010

Just Wondering

How much does it cost to do one of these? I wouldn't be surprised if it's a few million per incident if you count passenger time as having value, silly idea, I know. Plus the extra time getting to the airport? Plus all those TSA blueshirts hanging around?

This is the second one of these "unauthorized person" events in two weeks. One might argue that one of those TSA blueshirts might have done his or her job and kept this from happening.

Or that maybe all this "security" is working right along al-Qaeda's plan to paralyze us.

2 comments:

Peter said...

The article quoted a spokesperson from the Port Authority as saying "It's their [i.e., American Airlines'] terminal" meaning that AA is responsible for the door, not TSA. AA spokesperson said a determination of responsibility would be made by the investigating authorities... round robin.

And if you're looking at a cost analysis, I'd think the idea expressed by one of the delayed travellers would be much less costly than the current procedure: Find the person who caused the breach in the first place, rather than rescreen thousands of people and delay dozens of flights (and the cascading missed connections).

Cheryl Rofer said...

Yes - the first time this happened, a week or so ago, I was wondering why they just didn't find the guy.

Of course, if he were carrying a bomb, he could have passed it off to a confederate inside the "clean" zone, which is, I suspect, why they have to screen everyone again.

Or maybe it's just following the procedure.