Airlines Far From Their Best at Providing Sense of Security

Whatever the airlines have been doing since Sept. 11 to make flying safer, it isn’t nearly enough.

On Wednesday, while checking in for a Northwest Airlines flight from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, I got singled out to go stand in another line for a thorough inspection of the bag I was checking.

That’s the good news. I was flying alone, had a one-way ticket, and had purchased it that day, which understandably set off a few alarms.

But while waiting in the second line, the woman in front of me had a story that’ll make you want to go Greyhound. Within 10 days of the terrorist attacks, Donna Breslin had carried a can of pepper spray through security checkpoints at airports in Oklahoma City, Houston and New Orleans.

No one spotted it.

“I didn’t even remember that I had it with me until I reached into my briefcase for something and saw it there,” said Breslin, who lives in Oklahoma City and oversees clinical drug trials for pharmaceutical companies. She carries pepper spray for protection, but usually leaves it home when she flies.

You guys have got a problem, she told a Continental Airlines ticket agent and an airport security officer on her next trip through Oklahoma City. Breslin said the security guy told her a pepper canister looks just like lipstick on the scanner, so it doesn’t necessarily get flagged.

“I have to fly for a living, and it scares me to death that they overlook this,” says Breslin.

When Breslin was cleared to go in Minneapolis, I set my bag on the counter and a nice gent went through every last inch of it. As he did, another agent called to him.

“Hey Jack, is ammo OK?”

The second agent held up a box of shells for Jack to see, and I’m assuming, or at least hoping, that the passenger in question was a mere hunter. Well, Jack didn’t know if ammo was OK, which is a little scary by itself, so he radioed for someone to render a verdict.

Do I get an opinion on this? I asked an agent. Because as a general rule, I would say no to live ammo. It doesn’t matter that it’s going to be locked up in the belly of the plane. I just don’t want it in the air with me.

I’m not sure how the matter was resolved, but here’s another white-knuckle detail. Although my check-in bag was thoroughly inspected, my two carry-ons weren’t even opened. I put them on the belt at the next checkpoint, and the two guys at the X-ray monitor didn’t even appear to be looking at the screen.

This is what they call high alert?

If this is as good as it gets in a time of crisis, they ought to ban all carry-ons, because neither the system nor the people in place are adequate to the task.

“We will not surrender our freedom to travel,” President Bush said Thursday in a federal take-to-the-skies promotion in Chicago. He was standing in front of planes from American and United. Get it? America united?

Bush said he’s going to get more federal marshals on planes, seal the cockpit doors, and put the federal government in charge of airport security.

This is reassuring to fliers only up to the point where two Air Force generals have clearance to order commercial airliners shot out of the sky if there appears to be a threat to a U.S. city.

Who knows how close we might have come Thursday, when two F-16 fighter planes escorted an Air Canada plane back to Los Angeles after some lunatic allegedly smoked in the bathroom and then threatened American passengers.

As for Bush’s plan to make the skies friendly again, here’s a question: While we’re waiting for it to happen, can’t the airlines do anything besides grovel for public handouts?

These are the free-market champions of deregulation who crushed upstart competition. The people who stick it to customers at every opportunity. The same ones who made cut-rate, inept security the industry standard even when they were sitting on sky-high piles of cash, most of which was pocketed by the CEOs.

And then they were in line for a $15-billion bailout even as they planned to stiff their own employees. Northwest and American both announced without shame that they were invoking an emergency clause and refusing to pay severance to a combined 30,000 employees they were dumping, a decision they’re reconsidering under pressure.

And on top of all this, they’ve got an attitude.

Well before Sept. 11, my wife and I had scheduled a trip for early October on American. I happen to have flown so many miles on American, I’ve got platinum status.

So my wife calls and says due to the obvious concerns about safety, and the uncertainty of work schedules resulting from the possible start of World War III, we might like to reschedule.

One agent tells her one thing, another agent gets snippy and tells her another, and the bottom line is if we make a change in our plans, they’ll nick us for $100 per ticket.

How’s that jingle go?

Doing what we do best?

*

Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.