Who Monitors the Monitors?

Over the past seven years, air travel in the United States has become more and more of an ordeal rather than a convenience. Gone are the days that you could show up to the airport, pass through security relatively quickly and be at your gate with two minutes to spare and still relatively easily get yourself a seat on a plane to virtually any destination you wanted. Perhaps it's a good thing that it's no longer possible since it means only that much more security will be needed to make the experience difficult and time-consuming.

As it is ticket prices are on the rise, ammenitities on the plane are on the decline, wait time at airports is increasing and overall hassle is reaching its peak. We spend enough time sitting on the ground these days that adding to the delay is a surefire way to create more ire and anger among those sitting on the ground wondering when they will depart from the airport. It doesn't help matters any when the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) makes unnecessary delays even more unnecessary by breaking things in the name of passenger safety. It certainly was the case in Chicago recently.

Authorities report that during a night shift when planes were sitting idly on the tarmac at the airport in preparation for the next day's flights, TSA officers, wanting to determine if terrorists could conceivably break onto airport property and sabotage planes decided to test out their theory with the planes. Looking for ways to get in or penetrate the aircraft, TSA officers proceeded to climb all over the plane using whatever handholds and footholds they could find. What they ended up doing was using sensitive instruments and protrubances along the fuselage of the plane as their boosts and ended up breaking them on numerous planes. What this meant was that the next day when crews began prepping the planes for departure, they found that all the planes that had been used as test subjects were broken to the point that they would have been unsafe to fly.

Now perhaps I'm wrong but isn't the TSA supposed to be protecting us from threats? I know that they were doing just that when they were testing out possible break-ins on grounded planes but is it really necessary to be quite so gung-ho? Some could argue that the ends justifies the means and that the decision to do this test was perfectly within the realm of necessity but if the TSA had at least asked the airlines for assistance in these tests then perhaps so many planes wouldn't have been damaged. When I went flying growing up as a kid one of my instructors told me that there are parts on a plane that don't look important but can make your trip a living Hell if they are broken or in disrepair. Knowing that, he always said to be careful when using things to get up high on planes. Apparently no one ever taught the TSA that.

They have the right and the reason to do what it is they were doing but if there's one thing that came out of the investigations of September 11th it was that the terrorists at that time had planned a lot of their actions well in advance and had done their research. They had done hours of flight training to at least know how to fly their planes. One would assume that a terrorist looking to do something similar to a parked plane would know how to enter the plane without causing outward damage so why send agents to simulate a terrorist who doesn't know anything about planes? It just seems quite backwards to me. Whatever the case, the TSA has apologized but I'm sure it was the airlines who had to face the ire of the irate passengers left to wait on the ground due to damaged planes.