Next, please

MARTIN BROUGHTON, the chairman of British Airways, spoke for many a frazzled passenger at a powwow for Britain's airport operators on October 26th when he proclaimed that “completely redundant” airport-security procedures, such as the need to take off shoes and to unpack laptops, should be ditched. Every terrorist plot, successful or foiled, seems to lengthen the gauntlet of checks. The inconvenience peeves two-thirds of travellers, according to Which?, a British consumer group.

To appease irate customers, IATA, the air-transport industry's trade body, has been pushing for better security protocols, such as pre-screening of passengers. The idea is to look “for bad people and not just bad objects”, in the words of Giovanni Bisignani, IATA's director general.

Such checks would nip many threats in the bud, it is claimed. The details for those who got a thumbs-up would be passed to airport screeners, trained to detect suspect behaviour and decide whether a flyer deserves a more thorough pat-down.

Technology could help. An Israeli start-up called WeCU is developing a system capable of spotting suspicious individuals. It analyses how people react to images (photographs of known terrorists, say) which may provoke a detectable physiological response in miscreants.

The rub with new technologies is that they tend to hit political hurdles. In 2008, for instance, the European Parliament rejected body scanners, which work like big X-ray machines. Encouragingly, in reaction to Mr Broughton, Philip Hammond, Britain's transport secretary signalled change may be coming.