Many things were said about airport security after 9/11. However, those who travel often are too familiar with queues of planes such as the one seen in a photo above, and will probably agree with me that before 9/11 airport security did not stand a chance against organized, and well prepared terrorist attack. That is because the whole airport security business was like a large-cell fishing net that while seemed secure to a casual observer was intended to offer the absolute minimal resistance to a traveler, and to only catch obviously visible offenders.

What you see in the photo is a typical Friday night tarmac situation: airlines (acting as corporations) in a frantic chase after business customers were jamming flights into a schedule that would go awry should even a minute trouble occur anywhere in the complicated air travel process. It can take a plane filled to capacity with tired after a workweek travelers up to an hour to go through a queue like this, which is far from being a record in length.

Then it didn't matter to airlines that a typical 6:00pm flight between NYC, and let's say Chicago had a scheduled travel time of up to 2 hours longer, than a flight on the same route but which was scheduled at 11:00am. Average travelers don't pay attention to such details. To them it is more important that their flight does not get delayed. One of the reasons that a flight can get delayed is because not all ticketed passengers passed through personal security check even though their luggage is already onboard. Therefore it was in direct interest of airlines to have airport security act with quantity, and only in distant second quality of checks in mind.