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On Saturday, I flew down to Denver to visit some relatives.  And while flying out of the Butte Airport has never been terribly convenient, TSA has now made it downright infuriating.

The airport has no X-Ray machine for checked baggage so, all the luggage is hand searched. Because it’s just so much fun to watch someone you don’t know sort through your suitcase in full view of all the other passengers.  The poor college student at the front of the line was probably sorry that she packed her lacy unmentionables on top of her other clothes.

But while we may not have an X-Ray machine, the imbeciles at Homeland Security decided that we needed not one, but two machines to check for explosive substances.  So, the screeners also swab every piece of luggage inside and out for bomb making materials.

At the security checkpoint, TSA has no fewer than four agents crammed into a tiny 10 by 10 space.  One to check your ticket and ID at the door, one to operate the X-Ray machine, one to supervise the operation of the X-Ray machine, and another to re-check your boarding pass and ID before you walk through the metal detector.  And while these agents are never more than an arms length from one another they insist on talking on headsets.

The agents also take great pleasure in running luggage through the X-Ray machine while standing around the monitor saying things like, “Well, that cord there could be something,” and “That looks like a mass of some kind.”  Sometimes they run a bag through the machine three or four times so that they can examine every single blip on the screen in depth.  This group-think caused yours truly to stand there for almost 15 minutes (with no shoes on) while the man in front of me had his bag run through the machine over and over again.

The suspicious item that had TSA all aflutter? A cell phone charger.  The fiend.

After finally collecting my shoes, I walked the twenty-feet to the boarding gate.  But before I could enter the jetway, another TSA official emerged from a dark corner to perform a “random gate screening.” I didn’t even know they could do this, but apparently, they can.  I guess his “behavioral training” told him that I was behaving suspiciously.

The agent took my bag and rifled through it’s contents.  After discovering that I had a tube of chapstick and a tiny vial of Visine in the pocket, he looked at me and said, “Ma’am all liquids, gels, aerosols and creams must be in a Ziploc baggy.”   He then tossed my items in a nearby trash can.  Not content with his inspection, he then asked me to turn on my iPod and open a small black coin purse to make sure that I had no other contraband.

Of the two-dozen or so people on the flight, I was the only one chosen for this special privilege.

Also, frequent fliers, like myself, have learned that you never want to be the first person in the security line because that person is always selected for additonal screening.  During which, you are patted down in full view of the other passengers and everyone else in the airport.  If you’re a woman this includes the oh so awesome part where the female TSA official runs her thumbs around the wires of your bra and gropes the snaps on your jeans.  Embarassing and uncomfortable, great.

Based on my count for the 6:40 AM flight to Salt Lake City the ratio of TSA employees to passengers was 1:5.  Even if you filled both of Butte’s departure flights, you’d still only be screening 96 passengers per day.  That means that there is one TSA screener for every 12 passengers. A bit of overkill when you consider that airports in larger cities are understaffed.

I know there will be those who say that these people are just doing their job.  But the fact that we have an explosive detection device but not an X-Ray machine is asinine.  The idea that I need to be screened at check in, at the security point and then at the gate when these locations are not even 50 feet apart is ridiculous. And the fact that I have to be patted down and have my luggage sorted through with absolutely no regard for my privacy is infuriating.

I’ve flown out of the Helena airport, the Bozeman airport and the Missoula airport on several occassions and never been selected for additional screening, a hand search of my bag or a gate check.  I’ve traveled to major cities and foreign countries where the airport security personnel packed sub-machine guns and never had any trouble. And yet, every time I go to  the Butte airport, I have my privacy violated by government employees who root through my suitcase and carry on to justify their own existence.

When you consider that many of Montana’s smaller airports have no screeners and that large cities don’t have enough screeners, it seems even more ridiculous that Butte has so many over zealous bureaucrats rifling through our belongings and invading our privacy.  I would rather drive to Helena and pick up a flight there than fly out of Butte.  And since the Helena flights are often cheaper, I don’t see myself flying out of Butte any time soon.

I’ve flown out of the Helena airport, the Bozeman airport and the Missoula airport on several occassions and never been selected for additional screening, a hand search of my bag or a gate check.

Well, after this post expect that record to be erased ; ). I’ve had the same experience, but unlike yours, it’s happened in Missoula, Helena and Great Falls. Fly out of a city of any size and this is less common; of course your odds are better here simply because there are fewer of us in Montana, but still, I think the rent-a-cop mentality pervades the small town TSA. And by the way, nothing brings out the wands and anal exams faster than traveling with an infant. I think their profiling strategy pretty much comes down to picking who would be the most inconvenienced, simply because they can. It really is a perfect example of what happens when a problem is ’solved’ by government.

You have the right’s “culture of fear” to thank for that one. Sadly, experts say we’re not any safer either.

I observed a similar situation at Gallatin Field two days ago. The terminal was nearly empty except for hordes of TSA employees. Probably the ratio of TSA employees to passengers was 1 to 3. They put on quite a show trying to look like they were actually working. Most of them just keep walking back and forth, looking very official in their spiffy outfits with huge shiny badges. Everybody was wired with a headset and microphone. But of course they were only three feet apart from one another.

As far as I could tell, none of them were armed and none of them were wearing body armor, which means three or four well trained terrorists could have seized the entire terminal, not an aircraft, but the whole airport. Based on the number of police cars I saw parked outside, there were at least two local police officers on duty, but I only saw one during the hour I was at the terminal.

So what good does it do if you run passengers through three or four or five security checks before they board an aircraft when the airport itself is not secure?

Note to Lamnidae: The “culture of fear” was created on September 11, 2001, when 3,000 American civilians were killed in a terrorist attack. Maybe you did not hear about that. My criticism in this comment is about (1) a gross waste of government money, and (2) a misdirection of security resources.

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