Attribution: Suikotei, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Geoff Carter
The Christmas holidays are here. Millions of people will be taking to the air, the roads, and even the rail to get home for Christmas, and they will be dealing with all the frustrations, vagaries, and disappointments of travel. Things are changing at the airport—and not necessarily for the better.
I don’t travel a whole lot. My wife and I typically go to Mexico once a year or so, and we occasionally drive down to New Mexico, so we’re not really current with the newest technological innovations in the airline—and homeland security—industry. So, when we flew down to Puerto Vallarta last week, I was surprised—and a little dismayed, by some of technological advances in the security industry.
When we first went through security at Mitchell International Airport, we—as usual—took off our shoes, emptied our pockets, and removed our electronic devices from our carry-ons before going through the X-Ray machine—a kind I had never seen before. When I walked into the machine, stepped onto the stenciled footprints and raised my hands above my head—just like I was supposed to—the red light went off and I was taken off to the side where my pockets were rechecked. Empty. They wanded me and I still set it off.
I tried to explain that I had recently undergone a hernia repair in which a metal mesh had been installed in me, but they didn’t want to hear it. They didn’t seem to care. They didn’t even want to see the card I had saying I was carrying chicken wire around in my body.
One of the homeland security people told me I was going to be frisked and asked whether I would like to go to a private space to do it. I said no, to go right ahead. I wanted to get it over with. I wasn’t embarrassed at all. Not at first, but then the guard proceeded to frisk me quite thoroughly, so thoroughly I felt like he should have bought me dinner first. Then I was embarrassed—a little.
From security, we went to our gate, full of scores of future fellow passengers displaying varying levels of anxiety. There were the sleepers (it was an early morning flight), the cocooned, (those plugged in to something), the watchers (checking out everything and everybody) and the fidgeters (ready to leap into line as soon as boarding started. It’s the same in every airport I’ve ever been to—people worried about getting bumped, finding space for their bags in the overhead, or missing their connection. In today’s air travel, there’s plenty to be apprehensive about.
Another difference I noticed on this trip was the boarding procedure. In my previous experiences, when the announcer would start calling out seating sections for boarding, everyone, no matter where they stood in boarding order, would mob the entrance like lemmings on a cliff. This time, however—and I’m not sure why—people followed the rules. When Section 5, our section, was called, people behind us stayed behind us. For the first time, boarding was a civilized procedure. I’m still not sure why.
The trip itself was uneventful. There were no tantrums or meltdowns by children—or adults—and no one insulted or assaulted any of the stewards or stewardesses. Our connection at the Dallas Fort Worth airport also went very smoothly. And—once again—the boarding process was quite orderly and civilized. I still couldn’t figure out why. These were airline passengers filled with anxiety and terror (and sometimes alcohol) desperate to get to their destination. Why were they being so nice? I started to get suspicious. Had we all been surreptitiously sedated?
Surprisingly, when we finally did board our international flight, we didn’t have to show our passports. The gatekeeper took a picture of each passenger which they apparently linked to a passport database. Facial recognition id. The only thing they told us was to take off our glasses. Was a retinal scan involved? I began to feel like a cow on the meat packing line, or one of the holograms in a Matrix movie.
It was about a three-hour flight between Dallas and Puerto Vallarta. In the past, at some point during the flight, the flight attendants would hand out two forms to fill out—an ID form with an attached card and a customs declaration. It used to be that a foreign visitor would have to present that card when leaving the country to return home. Not anymore. We didn’t get the customs forms until we landed in Puerto Vallarta, which is an interesting experience in itself. Instead of taxiing up to a gate, international visitors disembark on the tarmac and board buses to get to customs. It’s sort of what I imagine (based on some Twilight Zone episodes I’ve seen) air travel used to be like in the early days of commercial aviation.
We arrived at Customs, and things had changed here, too. Instead of being interviewed by an agent, each traveler had to go to one in a row of sort of futuristic-looking clear plastic poles which had horizonatal flat glass plates attached. We were told to place our passports face down on the plate and wait until a pair of clear plastic doors opened, letting the traveler move to the next clear pole, which spit out a receipt which (we found out later) was supposed to replace the blue visitor card we used to fill out by hand. Unfortunately, no one told me to keep the slip and but for the tender mercies of an American Airlines counter person, I might never have left Mexico.
While we were working our way through these plastic passport-reading customs machines, a young man kept cruising back and forth along the line, telling us to step back and not crowd the line. He had an air of cynical world-weariness which just didn’t fit a guy who looked like he was still in high school and since we didn’t know what the hell was going on, the whole process was unnecessarily nerve-wracking.
The vacation itself was great, a ton of fun.
On the way back, I got frisked again—twice and experienced similar facial recognition technology during customs in Dallas. I wasn’t, and still am not, certain if I like it that my face seems to be in at least a few federal and maybe international databases. Granted, this new technology streamlines the process and saves everyone some time, but at what cost? Who knows what can be done with our faces? AI might actually make me handsome. Or a wanted man. Or George Clooney.
We did experience a ten-hour delay in Dallas due to airline “maintenance”, whatever that means. We stayed overnight at a local hotel and got on the first flight out the next morning and then we finally made it home. It wasn’t that bad. Had there been new technology involved, we just still might be there.
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