Travel planning

The new security regime was in place at airports when we travelled back. The nature of it makes it difficult to generalize, but here was our experience at Ontario Airport, Calif.

Two of the massive scanning systems have been brought in and installed, one on either end of the ticketing lobby. Regardless of whether you check in at the curb or at the counter, bags being checked must still be hauled over to these scanning machines (by the sky cap if you checked in at the curb, by you if you checked in at the counter).

You queue up, an attendant places the bags one at a time on the conveyor, and they are processed.

If the bags come through clear, they are placed on a baggage cart and wheeled off to wherever they get wheeled off to (through the lobby, which seems like a mild security risk).

If there are questions about the bags, they are taken over to little tables — in your presence — where they can be swabbed for explosive residue (similar to the systems that have been used at security gates for some time), and then, if the image warrents it, opened and hand-inspected.

In our case, one bag with some limes in it was opened (the machine made them look like tennis balls — or maybe grenades), and another with four place settings of utensils was opened, too.

The hand inspection of the bags looked to be thorough but non-disruptive. They had no problem closing the bags back up (remarkably so, since, given how Margie and Jim were packing them, I’d have expected opening the bags to have either caused an explosion, or else sucked all the atmosphere in the place into them due to the small black hole they place in each bag to aid fitting stuff in).

The attendant at the bottom of the escalator, leading to the “old” security checkpoint (for passengers) didn’t want to let us up with just luggage tags. Since that’s all the sky caps issue now, the question of what you get by checking in at the curb is one worth considering — though for us, having someone to cart your bags over to the inspection line was not trivial.

We had zip-tied the main compartments of the bags, and the TSA folks re-zip-tied the ones they opened.

Obviously the procedure is different at airports (such as Denver, I believe) where the scanning machines are behind the scenes. More reporting on that next week, when I fly back to California on business.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. Kitten slept through most of the flight, which was nice. We were delayed a bit getting off the plane, as they had some odd trouble getting the Jetway lined up, but it meant our bags were there and ready to go when we got to the carousels.