As someone who (used to) travel a lot, the TSA have signs plastered throughout the entire security line to remind you to look through your belongings and make sure you don't have any banned items (they included what they were and had pictures of them too). If you went through airport security with a banned item (such as a knife), what they did was offer you three choices:
- They let you go back outside of security and come back without it (the idea being is you go back to your car and put it back)
- They had a small mailing station where you could mail it back to yourself (you had to pay for mailing, IIRC it was like $5-10)
A friend discovered that he had a pocketknife with him just before he was about to go through security. So he went out to the airport smoker's area, dug a little hole in the ground, and buried the pocketknife. When he returned from his trip he went back and dug it up.
I had a family member who tried to do a similar thing with a potted plant in the airport lobby, but it was still gone as security apparently runs metal detectors over common hiding places every so often as part of a bomb sweep.
The TSA is responsible for creating the roadblock, and therefore should be responsible for keeping travelers whole. "read the rules" is not a justification for their policies, as it's common to have an arbitrarily-prohibited item hide in your bag. Especially the types of items that you want to live in your backpack (eg pocket knives) that you have to make sure to unpack before the airport.
For anything that can be checked on the airplane, there should be a free miniature bag that gets added to your checked luggage.
Anything that cannot ride on the airplane but can be ground shipped should get you a free envelope to ship.
For the remaining stuff (eg bulging lithium batteries), there should be a system whereby you can leave it at the checkpoint to be picked up by someone else within the same day.
Failing all of those, disposal should be the last option.
> The TSA is responsible for creating the roadblock, and therefore should be responsible for keeping travelers whole. "read the rules" is not a justification for their policies, as it's common to have an arbitrarily-prohibited item hide in your bag. Especially the types of items that you want to live in your backpack (eg pocket knives) that you have to make sure to unpack before the airport.
Knives aren't "arbitrarily-prohibited item[s]". There's a quite famous case of a series of hijackings that were done with box-cutters (e.g. utility knives), that resulted in 3,000 dead.
... and which will never succeed again. "Arbitrarily-prohibited" was a jab at everything else they've seen fit to condemn by extension, for example pliers. It's not just knives that you have to be concerned about, but anything remotely non-basic that you otherwise keep in your backpack.
That seems a little...overconfident. While some of the TSA stuff is definitely security theater that adds little value, not all of it is.
> "Arbitrarily-prohibited" was a jab at everything else they've seen fit to condemn by extension, for example pliers. It's not just knives that you have to be concerned about, but anything remotely non-basic that you otherwise keep in your backpack.
You can carry on pliers, just as long as they're less than 7 inches long:
The pair of pliers I have is 7.25 inches long. That rule seems quite reasonable to me.
They do have a difficult task: write rules that can be executed quickly by relatively low-level employees to exclude items that could be used as a weapon or be a danger to the plane. I doubt that's even possible to do without creating corner cases that someone could gripe about.
- They let you go back outside of security and come back without it (the idea being is you go back to your car and put it back)
- They had a small mailing station where you could mail it back to yourself (you had to pay for mailing, IIRC it was like $5-10)
- You let them confiscate it
It's not like what they consider banned items on airplanes are a secret. They even have a Twitter https://twitter.com/tsa/status/862098615472455680 and facebook page https://www.facebook.com/AskTSA where you can ask if an item is ok to go through security!
I am genuinely curious as to what they should do better.