Allow travelers to acquire, from their local federal building, an “Airline Security Test Baton.” This would be a smallish, coded, metal object in a variety of different shapes. If the traveler can smuggle this small object onto an airliner, and gets into the air, he publicly presents it to the nearest flight attendant and claims his prize:

Twenty million dollars.

Within a week, I guarantee you that airlines will become appropriately desperate about effectively conducting searches which will turn up these batons – and any other thingy that passengers might be interested in smuggling aboard.”

This sounds good at first hearing, but I think that it has some problems that would quickly show up if you do a gaming sim. Imagine the incentive to bribe airline security and ground personnel in such a scenario–it would become a lottery for them as well. They’d balance the chances of getting caught against a large share of the reward. The rewards and, ahem, disincentives, would have to be structured very carefully.

And even if they did get it right, and achieve their zero-defect goal, I’m afraid that if airlines did what was necessary to avoid having to pay out the twenty megabucks, their procedures would become so onerous that I personally would drive everywhere, even cross country, rather than endure them. Many others would follow suit, with devastating results to the economy. It would probably revive passenger ship travel to Europe and Asia to levels not seen since the advent of passenger jets.

My other concern is that, like the Congressional bickering over “how,” not “whether” to better disarm us in aircraft, it misses the real point of how to deter/prevent airplane hijackings (or school shootings). It presumes that tighter aircraft security (like gun control) is a feature, rather than a bug, and that doing even more of what has been shown to be a failed strategy will somehow result in future success.

Rather than catering to the Nervous Nellies who won’t “feel” safe until postal-worker-like civil servants are going through their body cavities, I’d rather see an intelligent public-education campaign–I think that we now have fertile ground for it. We have to separate the perception from the reality.

Prior to 911, the perception was that flying was safe from hijacking (due to all these “security” measures), whereas the reality, as 911 showed, was that we were very vulnerable, because we had been lulled into complacency by those same security measures. Since 911, the perception is that we are in flying danger, when in fact the chances of another hijacking are now very low, because we are more wary when we fly, and we are mad as hell, and aren’t going to take it any more (as demonstrated on the Pennsylvania flight that, due to cell phones, switched paradigms in real time that day). I feel quite safe, but also quite put upon, when I fly now, and I am deterred from traveling by air not by fear, but by extreme annoyance and inconvenience.

What we really need is for Tom Ridge, or better yet, the President, to explain this, and make a speech like that one United pilot did shortly after 911 (reportedly, to passenger cheers).

“We are at war now. We are all in the army now. Get to know your seat partner. Work out a plan pre-flight. If anyone attempts to harm anyone else, or take over the aircraft, attack them, with whatever you have handy. Defend yourselves and your loved ones. Defend the flight crew. Defend the aircraft.

Defend your country.”