A paragraph in a Wall Street Journal article caught my eye as I was collecting information about the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) frenzy following the Christmas bomber. It seemed to me that the evacuation at Newark, honey found in luggage in Bakersfield, drunks in planes above Colorado Springs and unruly passengers on the way to Hawaii were extraordinary.
Not so. It was an average week more or less for TSA if one were to measure each of these episodes as “incidents.” I contacted TSA and they confirmed and clarified their activities during the last few weeks of 2009.
Here is the paragraph in the Wall Street Journal article that caught my eye.
The 24 incidents the TSA tallied at U.S. airports from Dec. 27 to Jan. 3 involve checkpoint closures, terminal evacuations or breaches of sterile areas. That compares with 37 such incidents during the previous week, and 18 the week before that, according to TSA data. The TSA official said the agency screens more than two million passengers each day at thousands of checkpoints across the country, and that the holiday travel season could account for increases in incidents.
When I contacted TSA for clarification about these incidents they sent me the following information.
Wow! Who knew that that were so many incidents every week at TSA checkpoints. Perhaps these weeks, as holiday travel weeks, showed a higher number of incidents. But is seems that inspectors are being kept busy.
Photo by Joel Franusic Flickr Creative Commons
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
