In Europe you're not required to take off your belt because of an arbitrary rule like shoes in the US. They just tell you to take it off because most belts have metal parts so they will likely trigger the metal detector.
> The explosive apparently did not detonate due to the delay in the departure of Reid's flight. The rainy weather, along with Reid's foot perspiration, caused the fuse to be too damp to ignite.
Seems his biography was that of a petty criminal whose journey to radicalism began in prison. Pretty sad to think about. One considers an alternate reality in which he would have been rehabilitated beforehand instead. Seems like he might have had some serious problems, though.
It's arbitrary because all they do is X-ray them. X-rays can't tell you whether there are explosives in the shoe, all you can do is look for signs the shoe has been altered.
I don't think that requirement would have stopped Richard Reid. Maybe someone notices that his shoes look a little odd under the X-ray, but with sports shoes coming with weird air pockets and Heelys existing, it's not that odd.
It also slows down people moving through, making the security line a bigger target, and forces people to sit down just past security to put their shoes back on. Again, making the security line a much larger target.
We'd be better off just forcing everyone to do the hand swabs. One airport I went through had some kind of machine that purportedly could detect trace explosives coming off your clothing or skin. Those would be way better, if they work.
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We'd be better off just forcing everyone to do the hand swabs. One airport I went through had some kind of machine that purportedly could detect trace explosives coming off your clothing or skin. Those would be way better, if they work.
I've gone through that machine six times, in one trip.
Something in my backpack set it off, so they kept running swabs over and over again until the light went green.
It was an utter waste of time for everyone involved. The fools patted me down five times, looked through all my things, ran them through the x-ray machines, and can clearly see that all I have is the clothes on my back, a laptop, and two changes of clothes. But they won't let me through the security line until their magical explosive scanning oracle shows a green light.
As if anything about the risk I pose to a flight fundamentally changed between the first swab and search, and the sixth.
The best part is they were asking me what is causing it to go off. Why are you asking me? I don't know a god-damned thing about your magical black box.
