Tom Bossert Quotes

Our pat-down approach is very similar to what is being utilized in Europe and, as we know, around the world. It's even much more thorough in other parts of the world.

I take four planes a week, honestly. You know, I am for intelligence screening.

Now we are using the body scanner to scan the pilots. They became the dangerous people of this country?

Each and every one of the security measures we implement serves an important goal: providing safe and efficient air travel for the millions of people who rely on our aviation system every day.

Why we cannot build a system like El Al to be proactive. Why do we have only to react? The shoe bomber - reaction? Take off your shoes. The Nigerian - the body scanner is a result of the Nigerian guy.

It may be annoying, but the rash of hijackings by Connecticut WASP girls surely explains the time-consuming - but still somehow completely useless - examination of my personal effects. We all have to make sacrifices for airline safety.

They can argue whatever they want. The problem is, when you interview every passenger, during the interviews you are looking for - you profile - you do profiling, to find the suspicious ones and put them out from the rest of the passengers.

I flew on Air Force Two for eight years, and now I have to take off my shoes to get on an aeroplane.

Of course, you always have to be concerned about hijacking. But with the measures that are in place right now, I'd say that probably the airways are as safe as they've been in a good number of years.

We want to be sensitive to people's concerns about privacy about their personal being and things, while ensuring that everybody on every flight has been properly screened.

After 9/11, new security measures not only added longer lines and earlier check-ins, but took away our privilege of carrying knitting needles or our favorite moisturizer on board with us. Although we want to be safe when we fly, in some ways it all just adds to the misery of our experience.

I believe the public's confidence would be increased if the federal government took over the functions of airport security screening for all passengers.

You can't imagine a world, quite frankly, without a safe and secure aviation system. And so our job is to really focus on that, and what we need to do to keep it safe and secure.

We put people of concern on the watch list or the no-fly list, so we have a number of layers of security beyond the airport checkpoint. We gather as much information about a passenger as the law allows without profiling.

Now, a lot of what we are doing right now, quite frankly, is because of what happened on Christmas. Many of the things were kind of in the works. We were already planning, for example, the purchase and deployment of advanced imaging technology. You call them body scanners. We call them AITs (Advanced Imaging Technologies).

If we announced threats [to airlines and flights] as we received them, we would be catering to the terrorists' goals.

There were precisely two groups of people who desperately wanted airport security to be browbeaten into giving suspicious passengers a pass: terrorists and Democrats.

We need to put undercover security armed people at the curbside of the terminal with the uniform of policemen. We need to protect the terminal. We need to protect the security checkpoint, the gate, the aircraft, the perimeter.

There has to be so many other ways of approaching airline security than demeaning ourselves by giving up a lot of our dignities and our liberty to do this.

The bottom line is, if somebody doesn't go through proper security screening, they're not going to go on the flight.

When I travel overseas on many occasions, I get pulled out because I may be buying a one-way ticket, I may be traveling with my sister and we have different last names. That's smart profiling. Just pulling people out one at a time when we have millions of passengers in random screenings I'm not sure is the best way to do it.

And so we try to address those concerns in every way possible, recognizing, again, in the final analysis, everybody on that flight wants to be assured with the highest level of confidence that everybody else on that flight has been properly screened, and including me and you and everybody.

I'm confident that the terrorists are aware that from the curb to the cockpit we've got additional security measures that didn't exist a couple of years ago.

The episode of the 'shoe bomber,' Richard Reid, has suddenly meant more feet being bared at airports than at the average Hindu temple. My solution has been to replace my customary lace-up Oxfords with a pair of slip-on loafers when I fly. Generals are always fighting the last war, and security screeners are the same.

I feel gigantic affection for all of Homeland Security at airports.