Every now and then we find a bit of good news to celebrate. This is about your shoes.
The Transportation Security Administration has decided that air travelers no longer have to yank off their shoes before going through preflight security screening.
No more internal grimacing as you walk barefooted into the body scanners, struggling not to think about all the other feet that have trod on the same rubber mat. No more balancing on one foot as you wriggle back into your sneakers or hop around in your flip-flops. No more worrying that a fellow passenger will see your favorite Italian loafers in a gray plastic bin and decide they like those better than their beat-up Crocs.
TSA announced the repeal of the shoes-off policy effective immediately.
That’s certainly welcome news for the estimated 97,000 people who daily board planes at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood and Palm Beach International airports, though it might not ease the frustrations of travelers caught in torturously long lines as they wait to go through security.
Dates to the 9/11 era
The take-off-your-shoes rule was a relic of the post-9/11 era — specifically, the plot of a British man named Richard Reid, known as the “shoe bomber.” Reid boarded a plane in Paris in December 2001 and wore shoes stuffed with explosives on a packed American Airlines flight bound for Miami.
An attentive flight attendant noticed Reid’s attempts to detonate his beat-up black high-tops after smelling the match he had struck. Members of the flight crew and passengers subdued Reid by wrapping him up in belts, headphone cords, seatbelts and plastic handcuffs.
Reid is the only terrorist ever accused of using shoes to smuggle explosives onto an aircraft. He was recruited along with another would-be terrorist, who decided not to go through with his assigned sabotage.
Yet people have been forced to take their shoes off ever since 2006, when the shoe rule took effect.
At a press conference to announce the new policy, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem assured Americans that flights still had plenty of security. For once, we’re inclined to believe her.
It has been years since the TSA announced any attempt to destroy a passenger jet in flight. Most airports across the nation use sophisticated body imaging technology (so-called “naked scanners”) to look through travelers’ clothes in search of weapons or other anomalies.
Baggage handlers use bomb-sniffing dogs and advanced equipment to scan checked baggage. Airports have adopted strict security measures that keep non-employees away from areas where they could compromise an aircraft’s safety.
Security theater
Compared to these broad, effective protections, and others, many restrictions placed on travelers seem more like security theater than actual security.
Certainly, they won’t do very much to combat the bigger threats to passenger safety, which are the defunding of sophisticated weather-prediction technology and the dismissals or resignations of hundreds of employees in the Federal Aviation Administration or the National Weather Service.
Next, the TSA should ban the baggie. That’s the silly rule that restricts travelers to one quart-sized bag for liquids, with each bottle holding no more than 3.5 ounces.
It was always hard to see how that restriction effectively kept travelers safe. Certainly, it would be laughably easy to decant virulent chemical or bio-hazardous liquids into innocent-looking toothpaste tubes and plastic travel bottles.
And it has thwarted untold numbers of Americans who had to watch as their souvenir jars of salsa or bottled water and flasks of pricy hair gel went tumbling into those big garbage cans by the TSA checkpoints.
For now, if you’re looking for something to be happy about, be happy about the shoes — and give the Trump administration credit for putting its best foot forward toward a more rational flight security system.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, send an email to letters@sun-sentinel.com.
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