Nothing to see here

Patrick Smith, who writes "Ask the Pilot" on Salon notes that pilots and crew of planes pass through security, whilst everyone else with access to the plane via their job does not.

The requirement that pilots and flight attendants undergo checkpoint screening was imposed by the FAA after the crash of a Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) flight in 1987. A recently fired ground worker, David Burke, used his credentials, which the airline had failed to recover, to carry a concealed handgun onto flight 1771 from Los Angeles to San Francisco. En route, he shot both pilots and nosed the airplane into the ground near Harmony, Calif., killing all 44 on board.

The FAA's response was not to implement screening for ground workers, but for pilots and flight attendants instead. As a public relations gimmick, passengers now saw crews having to wait in the same annoying security queues as everybody else. It looked like a tighter system, when in reality it did nothing to preclude another David Burke.

The fact they want to do lots of window-dressing security makes me wonder what other items that we do not see might be menacing us in the skies. I'm really wondering what it will take to wake up the FAA - since I thought that alarm clock went off on 9/11/2001.