TSA Lets Delta Passenger Board With Meat Cleaver — Says Screeners ‘Were Never Trained’ To Catch It

A passenger at the Portland airport walked a meat cleaver through TSA on Thursday evening, boarded a Delta Air Lines flight to Salt Lake City, and finally someone noticed there was a large bladed weapon in the cabin.

A flight attendant reported the “hazardous item,” everyone was ordered off the aircraft and re-screened, and the flight left roughly two and a half hours late. No one was arrested.

TSA’s response so far is the usual formula: they “take this matter very seriously” and will “review the incident” and says they will pursue “appropriate corrective action that could include additional training of the security screening workforce.”

• Walking a prohibited weapon through security into the sterile area and onto an aircraft can be both a TSA civil violation and a criminal one.
  
• The lack of an arrest suggests investigators did not see an immediate threat – and that pursuing this would likely be more embarrassing for TSA than anything else.

Normally knives make it to TSA checkpoints when someone puts a kitchen knife or cleaver in a bag for a picnic or other event and then reuses the same bag for travel without thinking. Passengers show up at checkpoints with pocketknives and firearms saying they “forgot” these were in the bag. Some travelers carry blades because they feel safer with a weapon, and these infrequent flyers are blissfully unaware of screening rules.

TSA has a long history of missing most of the contraband going through security checkpoints. When various internal testing revealed 90%+ miss rates over a period of years, the TSA simply stopped releasing this data, treating it as sensitive security information. In the past, anything close to a ‘win’ has been trumpeted beyond credulity by the agency. Their continued silence on performance speaks volumes.

Most likely, local TSA leadership will write up an incident report. There could be additional training for screeners involved. There may be a short-term emphasis on x-ray image review and “threat recognition” refreshers for that checkpoint. But that’s likely it.

TSA Agents in Charlotte Watch News of the TSA’s Failure to Detect Weapons and Bombs, Instead of Searching for Weapons and Bombs (HT: Tocqueville)

Screeners in Portland, as at other airports, have just worked through the government shutdown with pay deferred, and are still waiting to be made whole financially (though many reportedly will receive large bonsues as well). There’s no indication that this played a role in the general incompetence. Expect them to investigate themselves and find themselves blameless.

Agents will happily pull a jar of peanut butter and a bottle of water, and toss those ostensibly dengarous items in a bin beside the checkpoint (rather than calling for a hazmat team). Yet they manage to miss a literal meat cleaver. It’s a flight attendant who caught it. That’s the ‘multiple layers of security’ TSA talks about it seems, with airline crew the layer that actually worked.