Deseret News | Confiscations at airports rise

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Confiscations at airports rise

More banned items turning up despite alerts

By Lee Davidson

Deseret News

Published: Saturday, July 30, 2005 11:50 p.m. MDT

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A surprise

TSA officials acknowledged some surprise that smaller airports tend to find more weapons per passenger than larger airports.

Utah airports followed that trend. The Cedar City airport confiscated twice as many weapons per passenger as Salt Lake City International; St. George nabbed seven times as many; Vernal had 15 times as many; and Moab reported a whopping 35 times as many. (See charts.)

Harmon said the TSA does not generate its own data on weapons found per originating passenger, so it had not seen such findings previously. (The Deseret Morning News developed it by combining TSA weapons information with data about originating passengers from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.)

Analysis showed that the average number of weapons surrendered per 1,000 originating passengers at "large hub" airports nationally was 7.7; it was 10.4 at medium-size hubs, 13.9 at small hubs and 17.1 at non-hubs.

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Morris guesses that happened in part because "people in small rural communities (around smaller airports) don't fly as often, so they are not as familiar with rules and regulations. And if you are from a farming community, maybe you are more likely to have things like a pocketknife or tools that are prohibited."

Also, he notes that small airports generally do not have gift shops or other options that large airports do to allow people to mail prohibited items back to themselves, so numbers of items there may be higher.

Harmon said no real difference exists between training for screeners at different sizes of airports or in the amount of time they take to check bags and people.

"Security is consistent from airport to airport," she said. "What varies is the travel habits of passengers from airport to airport."

Numbers of potential weapons surrendered also vary greatly.

Los Angeles International Airport confiscated the most, 718,685 total — about 4 percent of the nation's total by itself. (See accompanying charts.)

But LAX nabbed only 12.6 potential weapons per 1,000 originating passengers. The large-hub airport with the highest such rate — 24.1 potential weapons per 1,000 passengers — was Miami International.