To the Dismay of Flight Attendants, the TSA Reduces List of Weapons Prohibited on Planes

The big news in travel is the announcement by the TSA that starting on April 25, they will permit air passengers to carry on board their flights a whole array of potentially-damaging devices that used to be prohibited. Prominent among them are pocket knives less than 2.5" long and half an inch wide. Though all of us know that such knives can fatally hurt a human being, they will now be permitted in carry-on luggage, which means they can be accessed by their owners in the course of the flight. 

In the same gesture, the TSA announced last week that sporting equipment of the pole or bat variety can now be carried on board. You can bring with you a golf club, a children's-size bat, ski poles -- even though these items can be brandished or swung overhead to knock out a flight attendant or another passenger. 

What's particularly disturbing to me is the allowance of pocket knives. It is widely suspected, and partially confirmed by the luggage the hijackers left behind them, that the terrorists who brought down planes on September 11 were not equipped with box cutters, as was widely assumed, but with pocket knives. Such knives, drawn across the neck of a person, can kill them just as effectively as a box cutter. Various union officials representing flight attendants have bitterly complained about the TSA's new liberal policies and asked that they be reversed.

I'm with them. Despite all the seeming safeguards -- locked doors to the cockpits of all planes, federal marshals flying aboard surreptitiously -- there is now a greatly enhanced opportunity for either crazed people or terrorists to create mayhem aboard a flight. I can't for the life of me guess what caused the TSA to take a step that no one at all was really advocating, but simply assume that the constant, unreasoned criticism of that federal agency has made its officials eager to be liked. No one can constantly listen to the carping and criticism of our airport safety agents without wanting to take a step that will mollify the attackers. Too bad that the rest of us must now fly with less assurance that the terrorists, or the lunatics, will be thwarted.