Best alternative to airport security? Try the Vegas and France models

Just weeks after the end of a sometimes bitter and nasty political season, we're finally starting to see a little bipartisanship... Well, at least on one issue: a uniform disdain for the newly "enhanced" airport screening process.

I found it foolish and a little humiliating when I was first asked to take off my shoes in the airport security line. In the era of full-body scanners and intensive pat-downs, placing one's shoes on a conveyor belt no longer seems so bad.

The pat-down videos popping up on the Internet are as cringe-worthy as fingernails on a chalkboard. Passing through the new TSA airport screening process now falls somewhere between being frisked by the police and having the doctor check for a hernia on my list of experiences I want to avoid if at all possible.

The hassle and humiliation of the screening process is paradoxically intended to ease our minds. Enhanced screening procedures make air travel "safer," the TSA claims.

But air travel has always come with an element of danger. Although it's exceedingly rare, passenger airplanes do crash from time to time. And even the new full-body scanners and borderline groping pat-downs cannot find explosives hidden within a body cavity.

If a deranged radical terrorist wants to wreck havoc on a flight, he will find a way to get through security. These new procedures might make it a little bit more difficult, but I can't imagine there being too many radical nutjobs now saying to themselves, "Well, I was going to try to blow up a jetliner in a suicide mission, but these new security measures are too much to do deal with... I think I'll just go to the beach instead."

Even "enhanced" security is fallible. We know this and we fly, anyway. We subject ourselves to the humiliating screening process because flying is convenient. It works with our schedules. Instead of taking three days to drive from the west coast back home to Peachtree City to enjoy Thanksgiving with our families, we work a half day Wednesday and then fly out that afternoon.

Just hours later, we're home for the holidays. To many, the convenience of air travel is indispensable.

By contrast, if a restaurant were to employ the same screening process airports use, it would probably need to serve the best food in the world, or it would go out of business in a week.

I can think of two much more palatable alternatives to the hysteria of modern American airport security.

One is the Las Vegas model. Big casinos employ some of the tightest security standards on the planet, yet almost all of it remains hidden behind the scenes.
Security personnel constantly monitor hundreds of cameras. The officers are highly trained to recognize suspicious activity and their plain-clothesmen colleagues on the casino floor can appear instantly out of seemingly nowhere to nip a potential incident or crime in the bud.

The same style could be effective at airports. Run the passengers through a metal detector (shoes on), send their bags through image screeners and let the casino-style pros take it from there. Then put a couple of highly trained and armed air marshals on each flight.

Maybe this type of comprehensive security already takes place inside our airports, but if so, the new invasive passenger screenings are all the more ridiculous and humiliating.

My other solution is the European model. Well, it's technically not a solution to invasive airport screening procedures. It's a way for us to avoid airports. In Europe, employees earn about 40 days of paid vacation and holidays each year. Work weeks are capped at 48 hours by law. If we Americans weren't so tied to our jobs, we might be more inclined to spend an off day in transit. Cars, trains, buses and even boats have their charms and none require TSA checkpoints to use.