<p>I love how the response to people taking issue with the new TSA screening is that they have the option not to fly, but if they start looking for alternatives the peanut gallery has to chime in about how unreasonable they’re being.</p>
<p>Private jet. No screening. Get a bunch of people to go in on it with you to make the cost more bearable. Or hook up (how ever you define such things) with someone who owns one!</p>
<p>My son flew from upstate NY to Dallas and back in a day last spring for a funeral. Said the private jet was amazingly comfortable, easy, and circumvented the security craziness.)</p>
<p>My son flew from upstate NY to Dallas and back in a day last spring for a funeral. Said the private jet was amazingly comfortable, easy, and circumvented the security craziness.)</p>
<p>But what if your trip takes more than a day turn around time?
Where do you park it?</p>
<p>u<em>u</em>dad, there is no data anywhere on the FDA website on the clinical testing of these scanners. The public has to rely on heresay released by the TSA officials (and reluctant nodding of the FDA head, which I hope will roll just like Julie the Superbug Queen’s head rolled not so long ago). The yadda yadda generalizations about how much radiation they expose you to does not equal real data in my opinion. This is a new type of an X-ray device that supposedly concentrates its energy in the upper layer of skin (which is pretty thin where the so-called “junk” is located). Several groups of scientists and doctors raised concerned about the devices, including PhDs and MD from UCSF (the Radiology Department of UCSF School of Medicine ranks in the top 5 in the nation). I already posted this on the TSA thread, but I will post it again - here is one of the letters:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ucsf-jph-letter.pdf[/url]”>http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ucsf-jph-letter.pdf</a></p>
<p>The TSA issued a reply to this letter saying “no worries, these are safe”, but there is still NO clinical data released!</p>
<p>I think it gets parked at the airport? But I also gather that many of the private jet types actually own a “share” in the jet and the jet gets used a lot. So you might book <em>your</em> trip, but your co-owners might need their trip flown during your downtime? </p>
<p>In my son’s case, the team needed to be represented at Dallas for a funeral. A small team delegation was flown down via the private jet apparently donated for the day by an anonymous parent or alum. Could not have pulled this off (in-season) without the jet!</p>
<p>The CEO of my H’s company has a share in a jet and flies around the country as needed via the private jet. When locating a regional office it’s important that it be close to a small airport for the jet. it’s quite a perk to be invited to fly on the jet to the occasional conference!</p>
<p>Ucsd dad
I’m concerned about the radiation. I’m not sure the risks. My dd is really young. I wouldn’t want her to get cancer in 10 or 20 yrsfrom now. It would be a really sad.</p>
<p>^^I think that you are smart. MomofaTeen, I have the same concerns. I won’t be bullied out of my concerns. My solution is to ask my son to go for the pat down. </p>
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<p>Actually, my children use an ear piece rather than using placing the cell phone directly on their skulls.</p>
<p>Nice summary on CNN:</p>
<p>[Doctors</a> question TSA’s use of pat downs, body scans - CNN.com](<a href=“Doctors question TSA's use of pat downs, body scans - CNN.com”>Doctors question TSA's use of pat downs, body scans - CNN.com)</p>
<p>Anyone who compares radiowaves with X-rays should open their HS physics book or at least check this:</p>
<p>[Electromagnetic</a> Spectrum - Introduction](<a href=“Science”>Science)</p>
<p>We have a friend who refuses to fly for a variety of reasons (none related to TSA). She only travels to places where she can drive or take a train (or where she can get a boat…drove to the port for a cruise). The OPs daughter can take the train to school in the late summer and back in the spring when classes end. If she does not use a sleeper it will be about $300 one way but won’t be all that comfortable. However it is doable…about 3 1/2 days. For the other vacations, perhaps there are relatives or close friends close to the college and she could go there by car, bus or train. </p>
<p>College will only be four years (and that’s assuming the OPs daughter is a freshman) more. Alternately, if being at home for every school vacation is very important and flying is out of the question, then maybe there is a school closer to home where flying won’t be an issue at all.</p>
<p>You can take the bus. My husband did that from the east coast to the mid-west in college.</p>
<p>I saw this post and read with great interest. There are many reasons not to fly…maybe good…maybe crazy…probably or certainly limiting. But if you choose not to fly and yet still go places, then your travel becomes a journey. I like journeys.</p>
<p>I have always felt the security measures were superficial overkill and not helping safety at all. </p>
<p>But I also feel the recent buzz around pat downs is really just a media created thing. Nothing really new here, except now its been made into a giant fear thing from a few sensational stories, and because everyone has to deal with it if they refuse the scanner (not just the ‘other’ folks pulled out of line). </p>
<p>I’ve had several recent pat downs and it was inconsequential. So much so I wouldn’t be trying to protect my daughter from them. Its entirely in one’s head: if you want your daughter to have an issue with it, keep going on about what a big deal it is. </p>
<p>If I can let doctors examine me naked, or have a technician do some kind of invasive thing for medical reasons, or …surely I can get my limbs touched by security with gloves and cloth in between. I honestly don’t get what the big deal is about. Just pretend she’s a white woman with a lab coat and a lot of degrees, and not being paid minimum wage, and maybe it will be easier to tolerate :)</p>
<p>I get objecting to the principle of it, but my point is that in practice, for the most part it’s pretty darn trivial.</p>
<p>There are two types of full body scanners; only one uses x-rays. The one that uses x-rays produces the equivalent exposure that the person will get with 3 minutes of flight time above 30,000 feet. In other words, it’s like adding an extra 3 minutes to in-air time. </p>
<p>Obviously, if you are concerned about the safety due to x-ray exposure, you shouldn’t fly at all. (Actually… if you think about it, the risk of illness and injury from the flying is probably far more significant than the scanning, in general. I mean… you get on the plane packed in with 300 strangers in the height of flu season, schlepping some over-packed, too heavy small suitcase because you didn’t want to pay the extra charge for checked luggage, dealing with all the other equally overloaded passengers trying to shove their heavy cases in and out of the overhead bins… what’s the most rational thing to be afraid of? )</p>
<p>The pat down is only used for people who either refuse the body scan, or for people whose scan results raises some sort of question. (Such as unexplained lump on scan). </p>
<p>After my daughter arrived home from a cross-country flight last week, I asked her about the searches. She shrugged and said that she wasn’t bothered by the pat down searches, that she had undergone searches like that “all the time” when she was living in India, “every time there was a bomb scare”. (I’m glad that she didn’t mention it to me at the time) </p>
<p>As far as safety, I’d rather my daughter be in a plane where every other passenger had been thoroughly searched before getting on the plane, than be on a plane occupied by some idiot who wants to martyr himself by setting fire to explosives hidden in his underwear. And I’d rather my daughter spend 5 hours sitting on a crowded airplane, then spend 3 days traveling by herself on a train – it seems to me that there are a lot more opportunities to become the victim of theft or another crime during the course of a long train trip, especially if the person will be sleeping part of the time. </p>
<p>Anyway, just my opinion. I don’t think that these TSA measures are particularly effective – I’m sure that it just provides a challenge for would-be bombers to figure out how to circumvent whatever measure they use – but I’ve undergone some pretty thorough pat down searches just to enter a courtroom in the past.</p>
<p>calmom, do you really buy the lunacy about the exposure equivalency? I’m a scientist, and I don’t. The airport scanners pose more danger than environmental exposure, IMO because: (i) we are being told that they are safe, but no official data form clinical trials establishing their safety has been released; (ii) an airplane shields you from radiation up in the air; (iii) the dose from the scanner which by design is concentrated in the epithelium of your skin which, by weight, is a small fraction of your body weight, is being compared to the whole body exposure… I can tell you HOW Rapiscan machines have been evaluated: in a very lousy, non-controlled way. I refused to be a part of that experiment in 2008.</p>
<p>Will you take a pill that has not been through a thorough FDA evaluation of its efficacy and safety because the maker of the pill tells you, “Oh, it is structurally similar to aspirin, a couple of folks volunteered to take it and were OK afterwards, so it must be safe!”</p>
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<p>LOL. I’ll take a pat-down over a mammogram any day.</p>
<p>Bunsen Burner, we don’t need “clinical trials” to tell how much radiation is emitted by a particular machine – you only need to measure the output of the machine itself. A backscatter machine emits less than 10 microrem, about 1% of the exposure in a dental x-ray. An hour of flying at high altitude results in an exposure of a about 30 times as much as the scanner. </p>
<p>And no, the airplane body does NOT protect you from exposure. See: [Radiation</a> Exposure During Commercial Airline Flights](<a href=“http://www.hps.org/publicinformation/ate/faqs/commercialflights.html]Radiation”>Radiation Exposure During Commercial Airline Flights)</p>
<p>Why would you fly at all, given the fact that there are no “clinical trials” showing the impact of air travel on cancer rates? </p>
<p>Millimeter wave scanners – which are the only ones I’ve seen so far at airports – produce no ionizing radiation at all. (I think the backscatter machines are newer, so I might see them in the future – I’ve just only gone through the other type).</p>
<p>And if you don’t want to risk exposure to the scanner… then refuse! Or do you need a clinical trial to prove to yourself that you won’t get cancer from a pat down search?</p>
<p>No, I will be fine with a patdown (still do not think it is right and many others will have issues with patdowns). BTW, what is emitted and what is absorbed are two different species. Radiation does not have to fall under ionizing category to cause damage to living cells. Why do you think 510(k) process exist? What safeguards have been put in place to make sure the devices are not delivering a higher dose of radiation than is acceptable in the specs? How and how often do the devices get calibrated to make sure they stay within the specs? What training does the personnel running the devices recieve? Unless you have reviewed the actual safety and the other accompanying data, how can you be so sure that the devices are safe - just because someone told you so? Is there a reason the data on their safety has not been made public? </p>
<p>(Airplanes do not have an internal radiation source and are not intended to deliver a dose of radiation to a human, therefore, it is ridiculous to even talk about “clinical trials”.)</p>
<p>(I’d rather have a mammogram done by a trained medical professional than have a dose of radiation delivered to me by an untrained person with only a HS education who thinks that X-raying humans is the same deal as X-raying suitcases).</p>
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<p>It would have never even occurred to me to have mentioned anything about this to my 18 yo D, if I were sending her off for a flight. You go through a metal detector; you might go through a scanner; you might have to get patted down. Big whoops. You deal with them like a rational grownup, you move on with your day and forget about it 5 minutes later. You certainly don’t act as though you’re being “felt up” or being given cancer. I really dislike when people make big deals out of small things.</p>
<p>“It would have never even occurred to me to have mentioned anything about this to my 18 yo D, if I were sending her off for a flight. You go through a metal detector; you might go through a scanner; you might have to get patted down. Big whoops. You deal with them like a rational grownup, you move on with your day and forget about it 5 minutes later. You certainly don’t act as though you’re being “felt up” or being given cancer. I really dislike when people make big deals out of small things”</p>
<p>That’s exactly what I told my son who is flying on his own tomorrow. And added that if he is going to get patted down, he should do it in public. He thinks it’s all ridiculous.</p>
<p>I also told him that he ought to read his pm’s every now and then, you know.</p>