And this one;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykzqF...elated&search= applies to both sides of the Atlantic.
If I may relate a personal experience from a few weeks ago as I was passing through the bowels of Manchester Airport where flight crew have to go to be screened separately from the 'Mall Shoppers' upstairs. I was with my crew, all 18 of us plus our escort who had an ID that actually worked the various doors we had to traverse through to get back up the the departure gate.
Those crew who had various personal items in their little baggies were dutifully showing them to the screeners when I noticed on the far side of the checkpoint, a worker came into the area with one of those tall wire trolleys used to transport goods from the delivery vans to the retailers stock rooms. In the trolley were several bundles of 1 litre bottles of drinking water. Each bundle had about a dozen bottles shrink wrapped in clear plastic together.
The worker then had to put each bundle of shrink-wrapped water through the X-ray machine!!!!
The bottles were clear as was the wrapping. There was only clear liquid, most probaby water, in the bundles.
What was so obvious to us was that the 'security' monkeys, (I use the word 'security' advisedly and apologise to monkeys for insulting their intelligence and discretionary thinking) could just have looked at the bundles and seen that there were no sharp or solid objects hidden within the bottles but they had to go through the motions of x-raying them anyway. What was also glaringly obvious was that no attempt was made to check that the contents of the bottles was indeed water as that would have meant that they were rendered unsaleable.
So, as we crew were having our aftershave and lip-gel inspected to make sure we didn't have more than the prescribed 100ml, a worker was bringing through at leat 120 litres of clear liquid to be left airside, unchecked except for sharp pointy things inside!
Now they want to introduce random sampling of the liquids! It really is the asylum being taken over by the patients. It smacks of Ministry Muppets thinking up new ways to justify their existence. It has absolutely nothing to do with security.
Why, after the underground bombings, is there still no system of security measures in place other than public vigilance? I don't see bombs and terrorist acts being repeated on the trains every other day. The same applies to airport security. The way it is implemented is nothing but a sham and designed to fool the gullible public that something is actually being done.
Bring in proper profiling and use intelligence to filter out those people most likely to carry out acts of violence on an aircraft... those whose intent is to carry out an act of terrorism and not the 99.99999% of the rest of us who are not a threat. Someone with the intent on causing mayhem and disaster is not going to get past a properly trained profiler when they know that they are likely to meet their maker or vestal virgins once they get successfully airborne.