Yikes! Now, twelve years later.......I’m really scared. Heh.
At the time it was just a huge inconvience.
It’s not likely they’d subject a whole planeload to this treatment unless it was a really dicey situation and they just didn’t have any other way to try to see if someone on board was extra nervous about being in the same room with his baggage.
Even if this were the scenario, yeah, I would hope at the first sign of someone acting squirrelly and desperately trying to get out of the room, the authorities would have a plan to get everyone out safely.
In the 80s in Germany when they were dealing with a lot of domestic terrorism, and in Middle Eastern destinations, they would line the bags up on the tarmac by the plane. You had to walk by, identify your bags in the lineup, and have them checked against your ticket. Then you got on the plane — someone watched you get on -— and they put the bags aside for loading.
After all the passengers were on and the doors were closed, they loaded the bags.
If there were bags that no one claimed, which apparently had occured, special disposal teams were called.
It was not something I fully understood the significance of at the time.
P.S. Of course, the measures I’m describing do not work against the person who is willing to go down with the plane.