AIRWAY OK
Ease the hassle of travel before you even plan your trip. Price tags and garment labels adopting the AIRWAY OK system make security checks a breeze by taking the guess work out of the line.
While no one likes the uncertainty of standing in a security line, it's a fact of contemporary life. Without the option of erasing these procedures from our travel facilities we are forced to find ways to expedite the process. AIRWAY OK addresses the anxiety felt waiting in sluggish lines by arming every citizen with a way to determine beforehand whether or not they are going to cause the dreaded beep.
Should you be surprised when your sneakers have a metal arch inside them? Is it a guessing game with your metal zipper? Do I really have to take off this sweater?
AIRWAY OK proposes that all clothing and accessory price tags and care labels tell us whether or not they contain enough metal to set off a metal detector in the security queues. This helps the owner decide which clothes they need to pack in a suitcase and which they can wear while traveling. In this manner, AIRWAY OK expedites the entire security process by taking the guess work out of the line.
Implementation of this system requires minor modification to the printing and stitching processes already in place. With this minimal footprint it can be implemented quickly and with little or no additional investment.
The idea for this design comes from an incident at Providence, RI's TF Green Airport. As usual, I had chosen clothes and shoes that I thought would clear the metal detectors with no problems. In the line a TSA employee was chastising people until they took their shoes and belts off, deaf to the claims that neither contained metal. As I removed my shoes I overheard the man telling someone ahead of me that they didn't need to remove their shoes because they were Rockports. Apparently Rockport has been pre-approved by the TSA?
After removing everything that could possibly set off the metal detector I walked through the gate and, to my surprise, it beeped! Although my shoes had not beeped at another airport I figured they were the cause of the problem. I stepped aside and began the secondary screening wherein a middle age man wands my body. When he got to my kidney the wand started beeping.
"Do you have any implants, sir?"
Is he joking? Metallic kidney?? "Not that I know of..."
He keeps wanding it and stuttering. Then, of course, I remember that I'm wearing a shirt with a zippered pocket on the back near the kidney. I take off my sweater to expose the shirt below, he wands the zipper, it beeps, and he decides I'm all clear.
While putting my shoes on and repacking my laptop the man comes over and asks who made my shirt. I told him the brand name and he noted that it was the same as the shoes then wrote it down. The security staff at TF Green have obviously started keeping track of which brands of shoes and clothing cause problems at the metal detector. This is likely how they knew that Rockports are hassle free. I will not be surprised to see signs that read "PEOPLE WEARING CLOTHES FROM THESE MANUFACTURERS ARE TERRORISTS."
On the surface, the TSA employees were doing a great service to the people standing in line. It is helpful to know that a certain kind of shoe or jacket or whatever will set off the detectors, but finding out in line is way too late to save anyone a modicum of hassle. I've wanted to take a few pairs of shoes to the airport and have the security people wand them all and tell me which ones I can wear without getting stopped. Such an act would probably get me arrested.
When working on a studio project for Boston Logan's Terminal E, we learned that massive amounts of money go into calming people down before they go through security checks. I am venturing a guess that part of the anxiety these checks cause stems from the opacity of the process. With more transparency in the screening procedures perhaps we can set people's minds at ease, if only slightly. For this reason I am proposing AIRWAY OK as a means of allowing the passenger to rest assured that they will have no problems in the security line-- at least, not with a phantom metallic kidney.
Download the full AIRWAY OK entry here
--Posted 06/08/04 02:26PM