Current airport security measures devote tremendous resources (in terms of money, time, and most importantly, the mental attention of screeners) to intercepting objects which have been rendered harmless by current realities such as reinforced flight deck doors and the type of passenger reaction demonstrated on NWA 253. Given these realities, there is virtually no chance that a sharp or pointy object, for example, can ever cause an airliner to crash or be hijacked, and yet screeners devote tremendous mental effort to intercepting pocket knives, cockscrews, nail files, and even plastic toy swords from Disney World. And since people tend to focus their mental energy on tasks which are likely to be rewarded, and since pocket knives and nail files are far more commonly encountered than explosives, this further magnifies the extent of attention that screeners devote to identifying objects which are completely harmless but commonly found, at the expense of looking for anomalies (such as explosives hidden in new and innovative ways) which are truly dangerous but rarely encountered. The hunt for pointy objects has become a distraction we can no longer afford.

The only way to encourage screeners to focus their mental effort on real threats is to relieve them of the burden of identifying fake threats, and the reaction of the passengers on this flight demonstrates (if there was any remaining doubt) that most of the objects we take so much trouble to intercept no longer pose any real threat to aviation safety in the first place.