Matt Blaze has a great piece on the architecture of airport security — not enough seating to put your shoes back on, conveyors that aren't the same heights as the tables that feed them. I keep thinking about how the security system is designed for an octopus: what else could hold a boarding card, a pair of shoes, a jacket, a laptop, a freedom baggie, ID, and a carry-on bag?
The word is that TSA has tapped Disney to redesign its checkpoints, but it seems like the TSA has been redesigning Disney instead. On a trip to Walt Disney World, I discovered fingerprinting machines at all the entrances, as well as totally meaningless, time-consuming, invasive (but perfunctory) searches.
Somehow, for all the attention to minutiae in the guidelines, everything ends up just slightly wrong by the time it gets put together at an airport. Even if we accept some form of passenger screening as a necessary evil these days, today's checkpoints seem like case studies in basic usability failure designed to inflict maximum frustration on everyone involved. The tables aren't quite at the right height to smoothly enter the X-ray machines, bins slide off the edges of tables, there's never enough space or seating for putting shoes back on as you leave the screening area, basic instructions have to be yelled across crowded hallways. According to the TSA's manual, there are four models of standard approved X-ray machines, from two different manufacturers. All four have sightly different heights, and all are different from the heights of the standard approved tables. Do the people setting this stuff up ever actually fly? And if they can't even get something as simple as the furniture right, how confident should we be in the less visible but more critical parts of the system that we don't see every time we fly?
(via Schneier)
Update: Patrick sez, "I made a similar point in this column:
Squeezed into this undersized corridor amidst a mass of anxious travelers, half of whom are on the verge of missing their onward flights, I must now do the following as quickly as possible:
1. Remove my backpack; 2. Remove my jacket; 3. Remove my shoes; 4. Remove my iBook from the backpack, and from its case; 5. Remove my approved, one-quart sized Ziploc bag containing its legal allotment of three-ounce containers of liquids and gels from the backpack. Item 4 must be placed in separate tray, alone; Item 5 goes in a round plastic dish, also by itself; Items 1, 2, and 3 are piled together in a third tray. But not so fast, as a guard warns me not bury my shoes beneath the other items. He recommends I place them separately on the belt, or in yet another tray. So there I am, one person with four separate trays of belongings. And after those belongings are x-rayed, it's time to:
1. put my coat back on; 2. put my shoes back on; 3. re-pack the computer; 4. re-pack the approved, one-quart sized Ziploc bag; 5. Strap on my backpack. All of this with no chair or table, elbow to elbow with a dozen other people all doing the same thing. I'm trying to grab my stuff as more and more bins come clattering down the rollers. I can't find my shoes, and I have no idea where my passport is. The scene is so chaotic it's making my head spin. Then it gets worse:
"Whose bag is this?" yelps an extremely oversized woman in a red TSA vest. Naturally it's mine, and naturally she has to scan it again, because "there's something in there." That something turns out to be a 2.5-ounce bottle of hand sanitizer. In a rush, I'd packed it separately from my other lethal fluids and forgot about it.
