Avoiding airport security gridlock

So it seems that today another person in a major airport went someplace he wasn’t allowed and shut down the whole terminal for hours. Jules Paul Bouloute, who just returned from Haiti, walked through an alarmed security door and paralyzed JFK airport. This comes less than two weeks after Chinese student Haisong Jiang walked the wrong way through security and caused the evacuation of the Newark airport.

To me, it doesn’t matter whether these individuals have bad intent, whether they’re incompetent, or whether they just made a dumb mistake. The fact that someone can in five seconds cause six hours of misery and chaos to a terminal full of passengers shows how broken our air travel system truly is.

In the future, terrorists won’t bother to blow up planes. They won’t even have to carry any weapons. All they will do is push open a restricted door or walk through a security checkpoint and they’ll create more chaos than they ever could by blowing something up. And they’ll live to tell about it! Why affect just one flight when you can push through a busy airport and affect hundreds of flights?

There ought to be a way to keep these incidents from happening ever again. If it requires two separate checkpoints at airport exits, or electronic locks on emergency doors, surely there’s some way to keep from evacuating an entire airport terminal every time some fool breaches security. Yes, passengers who are delayed and are forced to be rescreened should be angry when a security incident occurs: they should be angry that this is the best we can do.