You want to feel safe in the air and you want to trust that the airlines and all their high tech security measures are going to keep you safe. You know that you really have no other choice but to put your faith in them and yet it seems that time and time again terrorists seem to find a way to get past airport security and onto flights. Sure there are lists of passengers that shouldn’t be allowed to fly or that should at least be questioned but even something as simple as referring to a list of passengers that shouldn’t fly is often overlooked.
Is it too much to ask that we be kept safe when there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide? Is keeping passengers safe really as difficult as it seems? Well, honestly this is a question to which both a yes and a no answer could arise.
Airlines and airports have significantly raised their flight and carry on restrictions and tend to perform more vigilant searches of passengers on a more consistent basis. On the other hand, however, it only takes one individual getting through with the wrong item to produce the catastrophic results of 911 and while you would like to assume that all the bad guys really are on a list, the fact of the matter is that new terrorists are coming onto the scene everyday without warning and those that know that they are flagged are very simply not even attempting to draw attention to themselves.
Another huge obstacle to public safety comes in the form of rights of the individual. This type of terrorist screening is said to be a form of racial profiling and that it should be illegal. This means that airport officials must ensure that they are targeting those individuals that they are searching at random and that if they look in 100 carryons of those traveling to the Middle East then they too must check 100 for those who are traveling to other countries as well.
At what point do we put our rights aside for the greater good and at what point do we stand on principle. Many feel that rights must be preserved at all cost and yet others will very simply lay down all their rights to begin to feel safe on commercial airline flights again. Commercial airlines have to make the difficult decisions and unless you choose to fly on a private flight, you too have to decide how far you will allow the airline industry to go in an attempt to keep you safe? Ultimately, the choice really is yours.
