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.
Was someone traveling to an Insane Clown Posse show?
*incoming* calls to abolish TSA (and ‘the gov’ment’, generally) *facepalm*
If you vote someone to be the president that has 34 felonies what is considered illegal or even intolerable?
Where does TSA’s response say the screeners weren’t trained?
Meanwhile, a smaller than a credit card sized multifunction tool (flat) which was a promo giveaway item at a conference was seized as one of the edges was jagged. ♂️. Maybe they were afraid I’d fix a loose screw.
Bottles of water are evil. Toothpaste is an abomination. Sunscreen will kill us all. At least we no longer have to take our shoes off
Interesting to know if said meat cleaver went through TSA inside a carry-on. If that is the case, for it to have been noticed inside the cabin one assumes it would have had to be removed from the bag or the bag opened to view at very least.
If TSA screening is so ineffectual, how is it that there’s not been another 9/11? Jus’ sayin’ ….
And what they trumpet as a win isn’t always so clear. A pilot told me about how they said they had interdicted “two explosive devices” from someone about to board his plane. It was a hunter who forgot a couple of leftover shotgun shells.
Mike, yes, we need screening at the airport, but box cutters were not prohibited items at the time of the 9/11 attacks. You can’t blame the private screeners for a “miss” in that case. I’d say that the main reasons that there haven’t been more mass attacks are good intel work, targeted special ops actions, and a terrorist population that’s presently on it’s back foot.
Screening needs to be done through AI and human beings can do secondary inspections on anything the AI rejects. Looking at bag after bag is a numbing activity. That being said, missing a manchette?
Reply to Mike about why there has not been another 9/11. It’s because we just bribed the Saudi government by selling them our most advanced jet fighter; the F35. We also ignored their brutal killing of a Washington Post journalist in Turkey. Now the Russians can easily steal the F35 technology. Does anybody still believe that Trump is not Putin’s playtoy.
So what? no one is going to hijack and airplane with a meat cleaver, the other passengers would beat him senseless. How about banning glassware? Rope? You could make lethal weapons out of those object.
You know, to put it in perspective, I never did like the cleaver in Ghosts & Goblins on the Commodore 64… I thought it was the worst.
I always wondered how Beatrix (Uma Thurman) in Kill Bill managed to travel carrying the super sharp Samurai (Katana) Sword on the plane in Japan and presumable back to the USA. Yeah, I know it is just fiction, but still.
Many years ago, when I was in Chinatown in Manhattan, I bought a Chinese cleaver, put it in my backpack, and carried it back to my apartment on the subway. It is still one of my favorite knives for cooking.
At the time, little did I know that New York City classifies all knives, including cleavers, as dangerous weapons which are banned on NYC mass transit. I could have been charged, obtained a permanent record, which would have prohibited me from obtaining global entry for life. Just saying.
Well said, @Mark F and @Joe United.
@Other Just Saying — Like speed limits and fare-jumpers, enforcement makes the difference. Rarely do I see the ‘searches’ at MTA stations, other than maybe 42nd street. Theaters, sporting events have security checkpoints. But, not much for trains; perhaps, it’s too much extra effort, or it hasn’t been an issue yet (but it has elsewhere, Europe, etc.) So, yeah, generally, let’s no do crime, but also specifically, because we wanna keep our Global Entry. *wink*
I had a 2 ounce bottle of manuka honey pulled from my backpack, and the suggestion was to go back and check it in my.backpack, which meant leaving a line of thousands of people and starting over.
TSA is pathetic. They should just go back to contract security officers. The gov could save a lot of money. TSA should never have been created in the first place. Some airports hire their own private contractors. TSA’s #1 item confiscated is WATER. They are great at finding our water. I travel all the time and have “Random” checks on my phone and “Random” checks for them to swab my shoes. Sad.
I can easily understand why this got missed. Their X-ray can’t actually see that something has a blade. Knives are identified by being knife shaped, not by being sharp. A cleaver is cleaver shaped, not knife shaped.
As for how it was discovered–I’m thinking of a passenger getting something out of their bag and realizing the cleaver is in there. In any sort of sensible regulatory environment someone who discovers they accidentally have contraband and says something about it should not be punished. Unfortunately, all too often we see stupid regulatory environments, the need to be seen to “do something” about a problem. And sometimes to address past selective enforcement. (Think of zero tolerance in schools. In the old days the administration could tell who the bad actors were, two people do the “same” thing (say, fighting) and get very different treatment (they knew who was the attacker and who was the defender–I’m thinking of the one time I got sent to the principal’s office. He took one look at us, said something along the lines of “I haven’t seen you before, you can go” to me. But some racists weren’t applying common sense and thus we now have a total lack of common sense.)