I was out on the west coast last week, and flew Northwest, which had me
connecting flights in Detroit.  So I get off the first plane in Detroit
and go down the terminal to the new gate, and give them my boarding pass
and my ID.  Figured I'd get right on the plane.  Wrong.  I was asked to
step aside to a nearby table, where they opened my suitcase and searched
through it.  They made me take off my shoes and unbuckle my belt and
frisked me, and waved a hand held metal detector under my arms, between my
legs and under my feet (I guess they thought I might have something in my
socks)  I had to empty my pockets and the security guy actually looked
through my wallet (he said I could be hiding a razor blade in there)

I complained that I had already passed through security
at LaGuardia in New York, where I did not have to take off my shoes or be
frisked or anything.  They said this was Detroit airport and they have
tighter security there and insist on re-checking everyone who connects
there, even if they have cleared security at their original airport.

I guess the detroit airport has a private security firm doing these extra
checks now.  Its really aggravating and self-defeating.  Next time I book
a flight on Northwest out to the coast, I'll book myself through Memphis
or somewhere else.  Why should I connect in Detroit if I am treated like a
criminal?  The plane left thirty plus minutes late because they were
checking everyone who was connecting, not originating there.  I think if I
passed through security at a major airport, that ought to be good enough
for the security nazis at detroit airport.  sheesh. 

167 responses total.

Damn, and I was going to comment, but Richard just lost his own argument
before it even started by referring to the Nazis.

okay thats the wrong phrase to use, but if we get to the point where 
everybody gets searched and treated like criminals, you get to the point
where it resembles something like a military state.  We cannot let
paranoia rule

Pretty obvious that he's only trolling about this because a lot of us are
local to Detroit.  I might as well not refute it.

Richard "slipped in," changing nothing.  

wrong, I would have complained about this regardless of what airport I 
was occurring in.  Senna, unless you have stood at an airport gate in 
your socks, while one security guy inspects your shoes while another 
inspects your wallet, and find yourself being physically frisked down, 
just shut up.  Paranoia after 9/11 has gotten out of control.  I can't 
even take my backpack, with a jacket and books in it, in case it gets 
cold or a rain delay anymore.  

Actually, on my trips to and from Miami, I got "pulled over" twice for
selective searches, going through everything, but I didn't post an item
whining about it.

Forgot to mention:  One of them was in Pittsburgh, after I had already cleared
Miami airport security.  

I agree it's out of control, but Detroit does have reason to be more careful
than other airports.

I would have complained no matter what airport Richard was occurring in, too,
but that's irrelevant to the issue.

I flew out of (and back to) Detroit recently and didn't have any unusual
experience with security.

Detroit Metro Airport is rated as being about THE WORST major airport in
North America from a traveler's point of view.  The problem the airport
management's attitude: contempt for customers.  They have some new
facilities, sure, but the bad old attitudes are still very much in
evidence.

Recent example: the proposed Detroit-to-Lansing passenger train route goes
right by Metro Airport, and it would seem reasonable to have a stop there. 
Um, no, the Airport has a longstanding policy that you have to PAY
enormous fees for the PRIVILEGE of picking up or dropping off people at
the airport, which makes it pretty much uneconomical to do it unless you
can make passengers pay huge surcharges.

That's why it costs something like $50 to get to the airport from Ann
Arbor, and why Greyhound/Indian Trails buses don't have a stop there.

Of course, if you drive there, the parking fees are horrific, too.

I don't think other airports are quite so mercenary (and merciless)  about
ground transportation fees.

The one person who is most directly to blame for this state of affairs (at
least currently if not historically) is Wayne County Executive Ed
McNamara.

Richard - next time, instead of avoiding Detroit, why not schedule in a
layover and come visit Grexers in Ann Arbor.  It's only about 35 minutes
from the airport.  I'll pick you up.

They are good about that in Ann Arbor.  When Jon and I visited a while 
back, there was someone to pick us up and people to take us around to 
all the various sites and someone to put us up and even someone to 
take us back to the airport to catch our return flight.  It was great 
and my first time on an airplane.

I have always hated the fact that if one wants to fly out of Metro, one 
really has to sucker a friend into doing the drop off/pick up thing 
unless one wants to pay huge amounts of bucks. It always kind of makes 
me mad. 

I kind of hate flying anyways and I hate all the security although I 
think some security is necessary. What richard described though does 
seem to be a little over the top. I did have to take my shoes off once 
after a flight but it was customs at JFK who was searching me after an 
international flight so that is different. I didnt get mad about it. 
Those folks were just doing their job. 

I think richard has already come up with his own solution which is to 
book a flight through Memphis instead of Detroit. Problem solved. 

I've flown out of DTW three times recently, all three times heading back
to Reagan National in DC. Two out of three times at DTW I was pulled over
at the checkpoint and wanded, while at National I never received any
special attention at all. (Apparently I'm not as suspicious as John
Dingell.)

This response has been erased.

richard must be BROWN.

Re #13:  They checked your feet, and *let them on the plane*?!

Re 315:  Mowed over?

I recently flew from Syracuse to Minneapolis (and back), connecting in 
Detroit both times.  I was not selected for the security inspection, 
even though I was connecting in Detroit.

I've had more security hassles in Syracuse than I have in Detroit.  
Although I've never been selected for the gate screening, where they go 
through all your carry on luggage, I have been "wanded" at the security 
checkpoint 3 times, and on 2 occasions, I've had to submit my backpack 
to be swabbed with some device that is then put in a reader of some 
sort.  Syracuse is also the only airport that I've been to that has made 
me take off my hat and put it through the x-ray machine.

This response has been erased.

no I'm not brown or evil looking or anything.  But I do have presently
long hair and a full beard, and my friend I was traveling with said 
jokingly that maybe they thought I looked too much like Charles Manson.
Sheesh.  Maybe if I was wearing a suit instead of blue jeans, I wouldnt
have been flagged.  Actually, there was an arab in line ahead of me who
had it worse.  When he was being searched, they called over a security
supervisor who grilled him about where he was going and demanded extra
identification and took possession of the man's cell phone.  Said the
stewardess had to hold onto it until the flight landed, and then he'd
get it back.  I did not have a cellphone with me, but was carrying my
discman, which I had to get out a cd and play it for the guard to prove
it was a working player and not a bomb in disguise.

I just got annoyed because they let two girls right ahead of me get
right on the plane, while I had to be subjected to this search.  Its
embarrassing having people walking by the gate seeing you being frisked
and having the wand waved under the bottoms of your feet, as if you
had something in your socks.  The wand they used was sensitive too, it
buzzed my pockets when I thought I had everything out.  Turns out I had
a couple sticks of gum in my other pocket and it picked up the tin foil!  Next
time I'll have to buy chicklets!

If it's embarassing, than you must've been silently chiding other people who
got pulled over before you were victimized.  Otherwise, you'd understand. ;)

They're trying to protect people retro-actively, which won't work, but nobody
has come up with a better system for security.  

re20:  try going in drag.

re#17 - HAHA, Actually it was customs checking my feet after I got off 
a plane from Heathrow. I think they were trying to determine if my feet 
were safe to enter the country or if they could keep me out on some 
kind of hazmat technicality. 


The last time I flew, I boarded a plane in San Francisco. I had bought 
a case of wine and instead of putting it in my suitcase or mailing it 
home, I bought a special wine shipping box and put some rope on it to 
use as a handle and checked it with the rest of my luggage. Apparently 
there was something suspicious about the box because a stewardess came 
and told me that I either had to consent to having it searched or I had 
to have the airline mail it to me. She asked me what was in the box and 
I felt like a total alcoholic because it was a whole case of wine! Then 
after a few minutes, she came up to me and just said "come with me" and 
I got really scared for a bit that someone slipped something into the 
box when I wasnt looking although I couldnt think of when that would 
have happened. It turned out that she just wanted to give me a better 
seat on the plane because I am fat and was jammed in a row with two 
other people even though there were whole rows with no one in them. 
*whew*

They're profiling, of course, but they're also searching people who don't fit
the profile.  My parents worked the WTC scene for around a month (as part of
the Federal effort).  When they flew home to Detroit, they were wearing all
these law enforcement pins and stuff like that (people trade these things on
the scene), had federal IDs, NDMS patches on their bags, etc., and *they* got
selected for a search at the airport.  The searchers were kind of embarrassed
about it, and made a point of thanking them for coming to NYC to help out,
but my parents were cool about the whole thing.

Of course, they could have deliberately searched my folks to make a point to
the middle eastern people they were also searching that they weren't being
singled out.

24: That's actually what they're doing. They search old ladies, children,
John Dingell, etc. on a regular basis to prove that Arabs aren't being
profiled (which, of course, they are.) It's official DOT policy. And
absolutely silly.

I have no problem with them searching John Dingell on a regular basis.  ;-)

I don't know.  I think profiling could backfire in more ways than
political ones.  I mean, if they know only Arab-looking men of a certain
age are being searched, terrorist groups will just recruit people like
John Walker Lindh that don't fit the profile.  It's not exactly rocket
science.

Which is why they'd better be searching people who don't fit the profile. 
And they have, at least on my trip.  My dad fits the profile of... an old man,
clearly stricken with something (cancer) and requiring oxygen on the plane
and a wheelchair to get around large areas like an airport.  He got searched
at least once.

On my flight to Columbus yesterday, I was randomly searched at the gate, 
and they confiscated my roll of gaff tape, apparently because it is 
functionally equivalent to handcuffs...  <boggle>

  To my mind <boggle> would be if they confiscated the tape but allowed
  you to carry the handcuffs you had in the same carry-on bag..

No handcuffs.  Having a pair confiscated while going through airport 
security with my parents while I was in middle school was enough to make 
the point  ;)

The gaff tape was in a carry-on bag with an LCD projector, power strip, 
extension cord and power and video input cables, none of the rest of 
which apparently posed any threat.  With the knots I know, I could bind 
someone more securely in about the same time with some of those cables 
than I could with the gaff tape.

You flew to Columbus?  Wow.

It's probably best not to mention your knot tying ability to the security
people. ;)

Since 9/11, I've flown from or to SFO, ORD, DTW, SJC, MSP, and SAN, some of
those multiple times, and the only differencees I've noticed in the security
procedures are that some ask for ID more frequently than others, and in the
three California airports on that list the National Guard people have bigger
guns.  They were all pulling some fraction of the travellers aside for
extra searches, and in all those airports I've heard people getting on the
planes complaining about having been stopped and searched multiple times. 
I don't think it was a Richard specific issue, and for all my other complaints
about DTW, I don't think I've seen anything DTW-specific about it.

At this point I dump the entire contents of my pockets, as well as my belt
and cell phone, into a bin to stick through the x-ray machine before even
attempting to get to the metal detector.  I put my jacket through the x-ray
machine as well, as the snaps and zipper seem to be enough to set off the
metal detectors.  The generally seems to get me through with minimal hassles,
although the first time I flew post 9/11 they did confiscate my nail clipper,
and the last time (at SFO, flying to DTW a couple weeks ago), they checked
my shoes for explosives.

It's somewhat of a pain, but they seem to have gotten the hour long security
checkpoint waits fixed, and I'm glad they're doing it.

(It was a business trip.  Discovery Channel paid, not me.)

Then again it amazes me how light airport security is in other regards.  Right
after 9/11 (about a month after) I drove down to the airport to pick someone
up who was being interviewed.  I wondered around the various terminals for
a while, left a running van with a co-worker out front, because I was wearing
responsible work clothes and looked clean cut I was left alone.  Hell I cou
ld have wandered up to the gates, one of the guards was taking a little happy
nap break.

And yet, the federal security testers *still* manage to smuggle guns, knives,
fake bombs, and what have you past the checkpoints more often than not.

This is why I took the train to Denver last month.

A train??!!!  Didn't you see that Steven Segal movie with the train?  You're
lucky to be alive, dude.  ;)

That's just a movie, silly.

(If Discovery is paying, I'd fly there, too)

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss