I first saw this on ABC. A pundit said that in this day and age of facial recognition software, behavior indicators and other security measures, there is no reason for embarrassing, undignified pat downs.
Agreed.
On a recent trip to Italy and Greece, I was subjected to several patdowns. I must look like a likely terrorist.
On the return trip at the Athens airport, I was the happy recipient of a randown patdown by a security guy there. Well alright, that happens.
So we get on the plane and land in Toronto for our connecting flight to the Twin Cities.
BOTH the wife and I were selected for extra security patdowns while the other passengers sailed through. That wasn't the end of it. The Air Canada person in Athens had mistakenly printed both our boarding passes with my name.
So when we landed in Toronto, the airline personnel wouldn't let her board our connecting flight until that was taken care of. But the security personnel argued amongst themselves for what seemed like an eternity before they ushered my wife into another room to get a correct boarding pass.
Meanwhile, they made us take off a lot of clothing and open our carry on suitcases. They proceeded to take out our tablets and made us turn them on. This is even though the tablets had gone through the x-ray machine with virtually everything else we had.
We've also never had our passports checked as often as we had them checked in the Toronto airport. It seemed every fifty feet we had our passports checked. They kept asking us questions like were we the people that had our mugs on our passports. I was sorely tempted to say no, that's not us, it's all fake, we're actually aliens from Mars, but I'd probably still be in some back room in the Toronto airport being beaten with a rubber hose for being a smarta**.
Moral of the story: we're never flying Air Canada EVER AGAIN!!!
