The big announcement from Homeland Security: the dreaded “shoes off” rule at U.S. airports is finally, mercifully, being put out to pasture. For the first time in nearly two decades, travelers are no longer universally required to perform a strange public striptease for the privilege of boarding a plane. It’s a small victory for sanity, but it’s also a stark reminder of a uniquely American brand of technological and bureaucratic inertia.
We’ve had this problem for years, created in response to a single, failed, and frankly, amateurish terror plot. A single instance, by one of our own, mind you, was enough to subject a continent of travelers to an enduring, inconvenient, and often unhygienic ritual. While the rest of the world, including countries with arguably more sophisticated security postures and certainly more frequent targets for terrorism, quietly adopted advanced scanning technologies, we remained committed to the absurd. We literally took our cues from a failed bomber, rather than from innovation.
It’s a bizarre juxtaposition of tech and our own self-inflicted problems. The very industry that has pushed the boundaries of technology in every other aspect of our lives – from automated check-in to digital keys, from seamless mobile bookings to AI-driven personalization – has, for years, forced travelers to shuffle barefoot across grimy security checkpoint floors. We created a problem that required a technological solution that had already been deployed elsewhere, but we were too stubborn, or perhaps too invested in the “security theater,” to implement it.
This is a microcosm of a larger issue in our industry and beyond. We are geniuses at building complex, innovative solutions, but we often fail to apply that same ingenuity to solving the most basic, self-imposed pain points. We’re so busy trying to build the next frictionless experience that we fail to notice the very real friction we ourselves have been building for years. We spend billions on scanners that can see through our shoes, only to spend billions more on scanners that can see through our shoes, all the while a technology to solve this has existed for years.
The official line is that new technology has made the rule obsolete. And here’s the kicker: that technology isn’t new. It’s been in use for years in airports around the globe. So, while we celebrate this small step forward, let’s not pretend it’s a giant leap for humanity. It’s simply the slow, grudging adoption of a solution to a problem that never should have existed in the first place.
Life is so tech. But we’re happy to see this one go!
Mark Fancourt
