TSA agents are unsure why a man decided to bring the body of his dead dog with him in a cardboard box on a flight from Newark Airport to Los Angeles on Tuesday, but he reportedly didn't seem too suspicious. During check-in, he informed workers of the contents of the box; the workers then told him that it would need to be screened at the Continental cargo facility. However, once the plane was in the air TSA workers realized that the box hadn't been screened, and feared it could contain a bomb or a disease.
Eventually the TSA concluded that the threat wasn't big enough to recall the plane, and it landed in Los Angeles without incident. However, the situation has caused some uproar within the air travel safety community, who have often been accused of not focusing on the right security measures. Analyst Robert Mann asked, "If it should have been screened, and it wasn’t, why wasn’t the airplane brought back?," and noted that the "shoe bomber" and "underwear bomber" were also inconspicuous. But analyst Mike Boyd says they made the right decision: "You’re not going to bring a dead dog through a screening checkpoint if it has a bomb in it." Words the TSA—nay, all of us—can surely live by.
