While I applaud the UK spooks who foiled the recent airline plot based in Britain, some of the reaction is getting a bit extreme and inconsistent:

An Alaska Airlines flight was evacuated on landing at Los Angeles International Airport on Monday after the flight crew became suspicious of a toy found on board.

Alaska Airlines Flight 281 from Guadalajara, Mexico, landed normally at LAX but taxied to a remote part of the airport, where passengers were quickly taken off while police using bomb-sniffing dogs investigated, an FBI spokesman said.

"The device was identified as a type of toy transmitter and a thorough search of the plane and cargo hold for explosives came up negative," he said.

Jet evacuated at LAX after toy spooks crew Mon Aug 14, 2006 7:58pm ET135, Reuters

OK, that makes some sense, given that Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq are being set off by anything from a cell phone to a water hose (fill it with water and the pressure of a truck driving over it flips a switch).

What about this one:

An office building in downtown Boston was evacuated Monday following the discovery of a suspicious package in a car.

The Boston police bomb squad closed off the area and removed the package which turned out to be a laptop computer.

Laptop Behind Bomb Scare In Downtown Boston Aug 14, 2006 6:00 pm US/Eastern, CBS4, Boston

What’s a laptop in a car in Boston got to do with a toy on a plane at LAX?

Well, two weeks ago I got off a plane from Vancouver to DFW and inadvertently left my laptop on the plane. I didn’t notice until the next day (I did pick up my laptop case). Numerous calls to DFW and the next destination of the plane turned up no laptop. Also, the airline was very positive that TSA did not have the laptop; anything found on the airline’s planes was not TSA’s problem.

The plane’s next destination, by the way, was Cancun. So I have to wonder. Did my laptop stay on the plane to Cancun? If so, that doesn’t speak particularly well of airport security. Or was it appropriated by the cleaning crew in DFW for their own use? If so, that doesn’t speak well of safety of passenger possessions on airlines; did I mention the laptop had my name plainly printed right across the top of the cover?

The local paper here in Austin recommends etching a drivers’ license number and state into several parts of the computer. This is not a bad idea, but I don’t see how it would really help if my laptop got all the way to Cancun. Who in Mexico is really going to care about a U.S. drivers’ license number?

Now don’t get me wrong: the principal fault here resides with me: I left the thing there; nobody made me do it.

I’m just surprised at the blase attitude of the airline in this case. Sure, it was before the recent British incident, but still, you’d think they’d care about a sizeable hunk of computing equipment found unattended on their airplane.

More in another post about a not too farfetched solution for this problem.

-jsq

PS: Thanks to Gretchen for the links.