Quick historical question for anybody who's been through an airport lately, meaning people with tickets who have the quaint idea of actually departing: Do our beloved United States remind us of pre-1975 Soviet Russia, a country in which the citizens waited in unending queues before being routinely victimized by government officials?

Yeah!

Or for the sake of argument: Do Americans remain almost-free citizens of the New World who can rightfully expect the return of goods and services for the billions of credit-card dollars we have slapped on the barrelhead to see the relatives over the weekend?   

Which is it? Can we fly? More precisely: If and when we fly, will we actually fly?    

Some of us will fly, some won't, and if our dire weather and air-traffic pundits are to be believed, everybody that succeeds in actually getting up in the air will be delayed.   

Many factors--some systemic, some not--have contributed to this, but we here at the noble Perrin Post would like to provide you with a couple of tips to slip you as quickly as possible through what will undoubtedly also be a kind of nightmare before you even get to the plane, if in fact you are fortunate enough actually to be flying. Which is to say: Forget the weather and the overbooking and the reluctance of the carriers to reduce air congestion. These are factors largely outside your control. However: Within the next few hours--if not immediately, this afternoon--we'll all need to slip through that process called passenger screening. Think of it as a sort of congestion that, to a small degree, you can control.

The managers of London Heathrow, the British Airport Authority, have studied the passenger screening process closely as a result of the August 2006 peroxide bombing plot against  North America-bound airliners. Because the screening rules for passengers changed overnight--and people literally could not be brought to their planes--several hundred thousand were stranded at British airports over the ensuing week, hundreds of flights were canceled, and a couple of hundred million dollars were lost.

Here's what the BAA people discovered, as they were busy taking bottles of perfume and moisturizer from passengers over the course of that week: It's all about the length of the tables. Meaning: If you give the passengers time and space to unburden their laptops, regulate the liquids they are carrying, and untie their shoes--and you repeat the information multiple times that they must do it--they will do it. We are, in a word, Pavlovian.   

So, in Heathrow's Terminal 4, for instance, the prep tables are between 20 and 40 yards long depending on passenger volume. There are directional loudspeakers informing passengers who are queuing alongside the tables as to the screening rules--in English, Urdu, and the other languages of that terminal's international passengers. 

American carriers and American airports have not yet grasped the fact that people need time and space to undress. At Delta's LaGuardia Terminal, for instance, the table before each of the X-ray machines is a mere ten feet long. LaGuardia is by no means the only American terminal with this problem--it's pandemic. What it means is that nobody in the queue can prepare for the checkpoint until they are right at it. It takes time to strip oneself of laptop, change, belt, shoes, PDA, cell phone, and so forth. If you have the chance to do it early, before you hit the X-ray conveyor, each passenger can save as much as 30 to 45 seconds. If there is a line of 200 people waiting to be screened, that's a minimum of 100 minutes more that being screened will cost the passengers in that line.

So, what to do? Here is our official CNT Passenger-Screening Akido Tip List (tm):
1. Strip yourself of all offending bits of metal BEFORE going to the airport.
2. WEAR loafers.
3. Carry your laptop OUTSIDE your bag.
4. Put your keys, loose change, pens, eyeglass cases, watch, cell phone, and belt IN your carry-on.   

Finally, when you get to the other side of the security checkpoint, PRAY you have a plane.