ATLANTA — The nation’s airport-security chief pleaded with Thanksgiving travelers for understanding and urged them not to boycott full-body scans Wednesday, lest their protest snarl what is already one of the busiest, most stressful flying days of the year.
Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole said Monday that such delaying actions would only “tie up people who want to go home and see their loved ones.”
“We all wish we lived in a world where security procedures at airports weren’t necessary,” he said, “but that just isn’t the case.”
He noted the purported attempt by a Nigerian with explosives in his underwear to bring down a plane over Detroit last Christmas.
There was little, if any, indication of a passenger revolt Monday at many major U.S. airports, with very few people declining the X-ray scan that can peer through their clothes. Those who refuse are subject to a pat-down search that includes the crotch and chest.
Many travelers said the scan and the pat-down were not much of an inconvenience and the stepped-up measures made them feel safer and were, in any case, unavoidable.
A loosely organized Internet campaign is urging people to refuse the scans on Wednesday in what is being called National Opt-Out Day.The extra time needed to pat down people could cause a cascade of delays at dozens of major airports, including those in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta.
“Just one or two recalcitrant passengers at an airport is all it takes to cause huge delays,” said Paul Ruden, a spokesman for the American Society of Travel Agents, which has warned its more than 8,000 members about delays.
More than 400 imaging units are being used at about 70 airports. Since the new procedures began Nov. 1, 34 million travelers have gone through checkpoints and less than 3 percent are patted down, according to the Transportation Security Administration.
At the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs said the government is “desperately” trying to balance security and privacy and will take the public’s concerns and complaints into account as it evaluates boarding checks.
The American Civil Liberties Union has received more than 600 complaints over three weeks from passengers who say they were subjected to humiliating pat-downs at U.S. airports, and the pace is accelerating, according to ACLU legislative counsel Christopher Calabrese.
Ricky D. McCoy, a Transportation Security Administration screener and president of a union local in Illinois and Wisconsin, said the atmosphere has changed in the past two weeks for officers in his region. Since word of thepat-downs hit the headlines, officers have been punched, pushed or shoved six times after they explained what would be happening, McCoy said.
“We have major problems because basically [the agency] never educated the public on what was going on,” he said.
Information for this article was contributed by Julie Pace, Sarah Brumfield, Joan Lowy, Russell Contreras, Dan Elliott, Karen Matthews and Sophia Tareen of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 11/23/2010