From rage to surrender, pat-downs continue

With the holiday season at its peak and a nearing Christmas, most of the travelers in US are apparently subjecting themselves to the pat-downs and body scans, the security measures adopted by Transportation Security Administration (TSA), at US airports though they feel outraged. In fact, holiday travelers had threatened a pre-Thanksgiving no-fly-day boycott too last month.

According to industry experts, American travelers are apprehensive that any threat from terrorism is bigger than the patdowns they had to undergo.

Earlier, airlines had expressed fears of decline in bookings because of the inconveniences through pat-downs and body scans but according to American Automobile Association (AAA), air travel is up 2.8 percent this year in the country.

TSA has implemented airports screening rules as a precautionary measure to avoid repeat of last Christmas when a Nigerian with explosives in his underwear tried to bring down an Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight.

Beefing up the security measures, TSA plans to install a thousand more full-body image scanners in place, wherever required, by the end of 2011. Currently, 483 scanners are installed across 78 airports in the US.