[MineralMan]

"I stopped flying when the TSA jackboots took over the airports. Flying use to be fun, but now it's an unpleasant experience, third world, I can do withhout. "

Your choice. I still fly a lot, and have no problems with security. By being prepared, I just breeze through. No jackboots at all. I don't beep. I don't carry wierd stuff. I just show my ticket, walk through the magnetic thing, pick up my carryon and go to the gate.

I haven't been pulled aside for months now. It's just a matter of planning.

But thanks, though. There's more room in the airport parking and in the terminal since you're not there.

[mewzilla]

Well, it's not just being pulled aside. It's the wait, the security, cancelled flights, the lack of leg room, the lost/damaged luggage, the squirrely rules you have to follow to get a cheap flight, the byzantine scheduling...Flying is a pain in general. Why pay for pain?

[Alberta's Child]

When I travel for business, I drive to any destination that I can get to within a day (about 18 hours for me).

When I travel for pleasure, I drive to any destination that has any kind of road going to it from my house.

[no-s]

You seem to enjoy posting a lot of "I never have any trouble" trolls on this thread, implying the complainers are just asking for it. You sound like a shill for the airlines or the TSA. Sorry, I'm not going to feel happy about the current situation by pretending everything is ok.

I traveled for years on airlines with (on my person) fingernail clippers, a multitool, and a survival knife designed to rip thru the skin of an airliner in the event of a survivable crash.

I never hijacked any airplanes with my tools. Furthermore I bet millions of other passengers did the same (at least for the first two), and they never did either. Who were all those US Citizens who hijacked planes and sent them into the WTC and the Pentagon???

In my experience flying since then I have been repeatedly selected for the triple whammy of searches (ticketing/checkpoint/gate), had a detector wand practically shoved up my anus, had a searcher take my handgun out of my checked baggage and wave it around for everyone to see, and experienced numerous other indignities which seemed to bear little relation to finding terrorists.

For example, I recently went to the airport to pick up my son, a 6' 1" 225# 14.9-year old who is perfectly able to change planes by himself and has been doing so since he was 12. The airline had retroactively determined he was too young to travel without "unaccompanied minor" escort which requires an extra $60 of documentation each way, and to collect him I had to pass through the security checkpoint (with the seeming mandatory and gratuitous search) in order to show identification and sign the "i've got it" document. Oh, BTW, since I wasn't traveling that day I had to get a special checkpoint pass. What was the purpose of all this? The airline's excuse? "Federal Rules" made them do it. They couldn't even identify the "Federal Rules" in question.

Lately I've just about given up on flying commercial, it's too much trouble. Unfortunately the feds continue to use our tax dollars to prop up the commercial airlines, so we can expect more of the same for some time to come, since with federal dollars comes more of this bureaucratic nonsense.