[KerrAvon]

The two things that have made airplane travel safer since 2001:

1. reinforced cockpit doors

2. widespread knowledge among passengers that you have to actively fight the hijackers instead of letting them alone (previously, the assumption was that they just want to fly to Cuba or something and it was safer to let them do that and get off the plane)

That's it.

TSA screening is worth nothing, costs taxpayers and businesses enormous amounts of time and money, and is a gigantic abuse vector. Dissolve it and replace it with a simple metal detectors and X-ray machine regime to check for obvious cases of idiots carrying firearms onto the plane; anything more than that is a waste of taxpayer money.

[Aloha]

(Edited) Right, okay, but who should operate those things?

[petsfed]

I would be supportive of a smaller, better selected, better trained, better compensated cadre of TSA agents. I think a lot of the reason why the TSA is so ineffective, and why so much of the airport experience is just theater, comes down to the fact that it is just a jobs program for people who could not get a job guarding the local mall.

[Aloha]

I don't actually think TSA can shrink by a substantial amount and still carry out even the reduced mission we've discussed here. You still need roughly the same number of people operating X-Ray and Magnetometers that you have operating body scanners and X-Rays now, it would go somewhat faster, but not vastly faster, the flow thru say, PreCheck and Regular TSA is within 15% of each other.

I think there is an assumption here that the 'theatre' component adds lots of people to TSA, and I don't think that's the case, just from my own observations - and having some understanding of how you move volumes of people thru a space.

For efficiency - I'm gonna make the assumption that we're still gonna keep a distinction between the airside and landside, and not put ID check back on the airlines at the gate.

Lets look at the staffing of a single TSA checkpoint -

1) Before the queue, you have a guy filtering precheck vs not - that guy could prolly go away. so -1 here.

2) At the end point of the queue, you have the guy doing ID verification and boarding pass check, that step is probably still needed here. So 0 - no change.

3) Pre Magnetometer Assist - This is the person helping pax put their belongings on the belt for going thru the magnetometer, its not always present, but usually is when they're busy. So 0 - no change.

4) X-Ray Operator, the person operating the X-Ray. So 0, no change.

5) Team of two people operating the magnetometer. I see no way to reduce this, you need someone to do a pat down for those who fail the magnetometer, so it's usually a pair of men and women. Again 0 - no change

6) 1-3 people to perform hand inspections of bags that look questionable on the X-Ray. You maybe could reduce this? it depends on the particulars of the details of the inspection.

7) Supervisor. Even in an ideal world, you still need a supervisor, plus the supervisor probably helps give breaks and fills in missing coverage on the short term when people are late.

Now while I can believe that the people at the checkpoints are just the tip of the proverbial TSA iceberg, This is the part that seems even harder to reduce, in any meaningful way.

The long and the short of this, is I don't think TSA can reduce its size in any meaningful way, airlines used to do all this threat analysis themselves in some level of isolation. Now its all centralized, without a probable meaningful level of change in employment.

[petsfed]

I wonder if there'd be fewer abuses by the TSA (especially theft, but also assault and harassment) if they had the resources to hire better people. Maybe there is still an opportunity to reduce staff if the quality of the staff still increases.

[Aloha]

I wonder what the actual incidents of these are, I suspect it's very low - figure that ~2m people fly in the states every day. Also, its not just TSA that has the chance to steal, airline employees do too, because they ferry the bags to the inspection and from it.

The issue for me isn't that TSA does bad things, it's like the whole debate over LE in the US - Law Enforcement Agencies cannot be held to reasonable account when their employees do bad things. Thats the real issue at hand here.

[Ridj48dhsnsh]

The airlines, either themselves or through contracted private security.