Southwest Airlines: People Are Being Partially Molested at TSA Checkpoints

I like Southwest Airlines for a lot of reasons. Their low fares, no baggage fees, the way they handle their boarding order now, and the fact they seem to actually be trying to please their customers:

While bad weather is usually the biggest threat to holiday travel, there's a bigger concern this year: new Transportation Security Administration procedures, including full-body scans and aggressive pat-downs that have screeners feeling inside waistbands and touching all the way up legs and on breasts.

The body scanners—385 of them now deployed at 68 airports—have raised privacy and radiation-exposure concerns. And the pat-downs, which started Nov. 1, have drawn fire from travel groups, lawmakers, civil-rights advocates, and pilot and flight-attendant unions.

The fear is that Thanksgiving travelers—many of them students, families and older people who fly once or twice a year—will be unfamiliar with TSA procedures and slow to get through checkpoints. Full-body scanners require removal of wallets, belts, jewelry and everything inside pockets.

"With people getting partially molested at checkpoints, all that is going to be a real shock for them," said Greg Wells, senior vice president of operations at Southwest Airlines. "TSA will create an issue for us. It's going to slow things down."

Southwest will have employees with walkie-talkies at checkpoints to hold airplane departures if passengers are stuck in long lines.

American Airlines was my airline of choice for many years because of their frequent flyer program and its tie-ins to many of the other services I used. However, when baggage fees were implemented I started looking for alternatives and found that Southwest was usually cheaper and more enjoyable a flight experience. They seem to actually like their passengers and don't look at them like some sort of inconvenience as many airlines do these days. They'll get my business whenever they're flying where I need to go.

For those who doubt the statement about people being molested, read this and this.

And for those who choose to go through the naked scanner but don't want to show everything, there's a product for you.