While I don’t travel all that often, I do travel between 6 and 12 times a year. I have my routines down pat and usually get through the airport unscathed. On my most recent trip to Portland, disaster almost ensued. I arrived at the airport very early as there are limited flights to San Diego and had nothing left to do downtown; this turned out to be a great thing. Security line was long and I made it to the porno scanner. As I always do, I opted out of the scan. I was doing my best to watch my bags as I waited for a screener to come over, but it is pretty hard to do so. After 10-15 minutes, they finally found a screener for me to do my rub down, I mean pat down. This kind of delay is pretty routine when I go through Portland; I find this unacceptable. Also, I find it interesting that every family that was traveling with a child, the TSA officer let all members of the family go through the metal detector and not one of them had to go to the millimeter wave detector.
When asked what items were mine, I pointed to a bin and my backpack and told the screener that my suitcase was missing. Depending on the day, I shove my phone, watch and wallet in my backpack or my suitcase. This trip, I put my phone and watch in my backpack and my wallet in the bin with my shoes. I did, however, but my belt in my suitcase. This must have been an “oh sh*t” moment for them as they didn’t seem to know what to do. The head person said that they’d review the video footage and try to locate the person that took my bag. I had my screening with a very nice officer who skipped over some of the baloney speech as he knew I’d been through it before. After the screening, they saw that a bag was left behind and searched it as I indicated it is likely that someone took the wrong bag. One officer found a pill bottle with a name on it, which allowed them to page the person and hope that the person would come back to the screening area.
I asked if they could use the passenger manifests and find out what flight the person was on and get the airline to grab the bag before the person boarded. I was told that they didn’t have access to that information. This, of course, is completely false as the TSA can’t do its job with the no fly list without knowing who is on what flight. A passenger search is a simple task as there are many a few thousand people in the airport and searching a database of that size takes maybe a few seconds at most. This is what really annoyed me (besides waiting for my screening) as they have enough information to locate my bag (unless the person left the sterile area).
Luckily they found my bag as it appears that the passenger heard the message over the intercom. The passenger was very apologetic and it was an honest mistake (OK, his bag really didn’t look like mine, except that it was black).
I’ve learned a few things about this experience. First, I need a big piece of brightly colored duct tape on my bag. Second, I need to grab a Bluetooth LE beacon such as StickNFind or Tile and shove it in my bag. Even though the range isn’t great, it could give me half a chance of finding my bag running up and down the terminal or setting up an alert when the bag leaves the area of my phone (this assumes that my phone isn’t in the bag and isn’t taken at the same time). Third, I really need to get into the TSA PreCheck program. I have no problems spending the $85 and submitting my fingerprints, but there isn’t a facility close to me right now to process my application. Portland, however, has one so I’ll try to set that up for my next trip up there if it works out. And the last thing is to speak up and get one of the officers to pull my bags off the conveyer belt right after it goes through the scanner.