Another crazy story about the TSA from The Verge:
Soon, Cooper was joined at her station by a supervisor, followed by an assortment of EMTs and airport police officers. The passenger was dead. She and her family had arrived several hours prior, per the airport’s guidance for international flights, but she died sometime after check-in. Since they had her boarding pass in hand, the distraught family figured that they would still try to get her on the flight. Better that than leave her in a foreign country’s medical system, they figured.
The family might not have known it, but they had run into one of air travel’s many gray areas. Without a formal death certificate, the passenger could not be considered legally dead. And US law obligates airlines to accommodate their ticketed and checked-in passengers, even if they have “a physical or mental impairment that, on a permanent or temporary basis, substantially limits one or more major life activities.” In short: she could still fly. But not before her body got checked for contraband, weapons, or explosives. And since the TSA’s body scanners can only be used on people who can stand up, the corpse would have to be manually patted down.
“We’re just following TSA protocol,” Cooper explained.
You may remember, I posted about another Verge story on the TSA a while back. This most recent story is just a continuation on some of the wild stuff that happens at airport security in the United States.
In this most recent story I can’t decide what is crazier, that a family tried to take a dead relative on a flight (without actually alerting anyone she was dead) or that the TSA was completely fine just patting them down and letting them through the checkpoint. And the article goes on to point out how little TSA agents make, even after many years of service, so you end up with burned out workers who leave and you churn through a new batch. It is as though the TSA does not want it to be a career nor do they want to make the experience any better for passengers or for their employees.
