Far-fetched? I really don't think so.

Perhaps the Russians were playing it a bit too casual, but we should draw from their example if and when the time comes.

It's hard to believe sometimes that we are the same country, the same society, that managed to keep its head together through the various terror attacks of the 1970s and '80s, from TWA to Pan Am 103. Something in our psyche has changed since then. We've lost our sense of perspective, if not our courage entirely.

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And although airplanes themselves are historically the choicest target, attacks inside terminals are nothing new. In 1972, the Japanese Red Army killed 26 people in the arrivals lounge at Israel's Lod Airport (today Ben Gurion International). In 1985, the Abu Nidal group killed 20 in a pair of coordinated ticket counter assaults in Vienna and Rome. There have been smaller-scale assaults as well. In 2002, a gunman killed three people near the El Al Airlines ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport.

Already experts are calling into question the security protocols at Domodedovo, one of three large airports serving the city of Moscow. In 2004, they point out, a pair of female suicide bombers boarded two jets at Domodedovo, killing all 90 people aboard both flights.

Thorough and effective security should be a given at any major airport. But that same security needs also to be rational, and some of the things I'm hearing should give us pause.

"Aviation security experts have been warning since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks," states one Associated Press story on Monday's bombing, "that the crowds at many airports present tempting targets to suicide bombers. Arrivals halls are usually open to anyone."

This same sentiment is popping up in much of the coverage, with the implication that our airports aren't yet secure enough -- and that only more barricades and scanners and cameras and automatic weapons will make them so.

Domodedovo reopened shortly after the blast, but access to the terminals was closed off to everybody except employees and ticketed passengers. Metal detectors were moved to the entryways. That's pretty drastic, but imagine for a minute if this had happened in America. I reckon we'd have razor wire and blast walls out to the airport perimeter, with Transportation Security Administration checkpoints even in the parking lots.

As if, by moving the fences, they can't get us.

I submit this is precisely the wrong line of thinking. It is reactionary in the purest sense, and plays directly into the terrorists' strategy -- a strategy that encourages a response that is based on fear instead of reason, and that is ultimately self-defeating.

Reality is that we can never make our airports, or any other crowded places, impervious to attack. And while maybe you wouldn't mind living in a society in which every terminal, shopping mall, sports venue and subway station has been militarized and strung with surveillance equipment, count me among those who would.

If only there were a way of preempting the hysteria. Instead of building walls and barricades, we need to build a stronger national character -- one that resolves to thwart such atrocities, indeed, but also one that is able to come to terms with a certain, inevitable vulnerability.

Wishful thinking, maybe, in such a fear-addled society as ours.

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But it does exist, and that's the good part.

The bad part is the people. That such a stupefyingly beautiful place could be ruined by throngs of visitors is one of the great scandals of global travel. But so it is, just about. Hundreds of thousands of tourists -- let me correct myself, hundreds of thousands of young and obnoxious tourists -- come to this watery corner of Asia each year to behold the Phi Phi Islands.

And to drink, and to party, and to stay up till 4 a.m. listening to hip-hop music out at the beach, and to whoop and screech and holler and pass out naked in the sand and SLAM SLAM SLAM their hotel room doors.

The scene is a mix of long-haul backpackers and European package tourists on winter junkets -- a kind of MTV Beach Party meets Lonely Planet. With all of the accessories. There is enough tattoo ink on Phi Phi to turn the Andaman Sea black; enough body piercings to set every airport metal detector in Southeast Asia ringing.

The largest of the Phi Phi islands is called Phi Phi Don. The main town on Don -- indeed the only town -- sits on a skinny isthmus slung between jagged green mountains, like the handle of a barbell. Their are no cars here, but still there's plenty of gridlock -- great, undulating clots of guys and girls in their 20s, slouching around in dreadlocks and camping shorts.

I have been to my share of hyper-touristy places, and to plenty of backpacker haunts. But I have never seen crowds so unbearable as this. In high season there are so many people it can be difficult to walk.

Then at night the noise starts.

And one of the things that amazes me is how miserable all of these kids seem. Not so much the guys as the girls, who wander around with fixed, glassy stares. It's a look of both intensity and detachment, a sort of pained bewilderment, as if every girl on the island has suddenly been told she is pregnant with quadruplets.

Our stay in Don town is brief and excruciating, as it would be for anybody over the age of 24 and sober. On the second day we take a long-tail boat over to the "quiet" east side of the island. We rent a beachfront cabin in one of the secluded cottages that dot the island's perimeter. It's a lovely spot, swathed in tropical vegetation. Cozy, Thai-style bungalows overlook a private beach perfect for swimming and snorkeling. The surf is patterned with corals, a tricolor of turquoise -- blue, bluer, bluest -- marking off the depths.

But quiet? Not so much. It is both an older and a younger crowd. Which is to say a crowd of European families, most of them from Denmark and most of them toting two, three or even four small children. The bungalow directly across from ours contains what I initially take to be an animal in some horrible wrenching pain. Actually, it's a pair of infants, who proceeded to shriek and howl long into the night.

(I am hoping somebody can explain the connection between Denmark and Thailand. That the Danes are all over Thailand isn't so mysterious when you consider climate, but the reverse is true as well. I was in Denmark recently and kept seeing Thai people everywhere: sightseeing, working in shops, riding the subway. Sure enough, on Phi Phi, one of our waiters told us he had just returned from a year's stay in Copenhagen.)

Early the next morning we hire a long-tail for a ride over to Phi Phi Leh, Don's neighbor and an island of such otherworldly splendor -- towering red and green karsts interlaced with turquoise lagoons -- that it can barely be described. A group of kids has been camping there, and we pass them on one of the trails. One of them, a young girl about 19 or 20, has fallen back from the others and is walking alone. The trail is only a few feet wide, and I turn to let her pass. For what it matters, she is maybe the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in my life, with closely cropped, white-blond hair and a soft, wide face that appears to have been buffed out of ivory. But in her blue eyes, there is That Look again -- the gaze of a shark. "Hi," I say.

No response. She trudges around me without so much as a word or a glance, onward through the sand, burdened into silence by her quadruplets or whatever it is that has turned these kids into sullen little robots.

Phi Phi Leh's main draw is the famous Maya Beach, an idyllic sandy crescent set amid jagged green hills. But the real highlight is a visit to the spectacular Pileh Lagoon -- a fantastical keyhole bay surrounded by immense green cliffs. The trick is to get here as early as possible, before the tour boats from Don and Phuket start motoring in. The midday crowds on Maya, barely a quarter-mile wide, are hundreds strong. Pileh can feel like a Florida water park.

On the third afternoon we are on the ferry back to Phuket. The motors crank up and we feel like high-fiving. It's like escape from Alcatraz. Funny how the excitement of traveling can sometimes work in reverse.

Jubilation will have to wait, however, at least until we're docked, because most of the island is coming with us. As it was on the way over, the vessel is jampacked with about 500 people and just as many backpacks.

Once underway people migrate toward the back, clustering like flies on the lower stern. I stake out a position against a railing on the topside deck, with a bird's-eye view of this assembly. As people gather, the scene below can only be described as a circus -- an elbow-to-elbow scrum of dudes and dudettes kitted out in the preposterous, inexplicable trappings of today's young people.

As a guy who at age 19 wore a studded leather jacket and Levis spattered with house paint, it'd be brazen of me to ridicule any generation's fashion trends, but how and when, exactly, did it become de rigueur for young white guys to strut around with the top 4 inches of their boxer shorts sticking out? Do girls somehow find this attractive? And I believe the time has come to begin the forced amputations of arms decorated by those "tribal" pattern shoulder tattoos. And so on and so forth: the dreads, the beads, the nostril rings.

But the real stars of this freak show are a slightly older, almost middle-aged British couple and their overweight son. The kid, who is maybe 9 or 10, is wearing a Red Bull baseball cap, Converse-style high-tops, a pink Lonsdale polo and aviator sunglasses. The father, lumbering and dopey-eyed, is decked out in a Yankees cap and a caustic yellow T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Suits Suck."

His missus, though -- a sun-blistered brunette hard at work on can after can of Chang lager -- is the one I want to focus on. She is wearing something that, however offensive and impossible for me to understand, is mysteriously popular, as I keep seeing it on different women all over Phi Phi. The item in question is a sleeveless tee bearing the grainy image of a slutty-looking blonde. The blonde is affecting one of those fuck me/fuck you poses. She is topless and turned to profile. She is biting her lip and sticking her middle finger at the viewer.

I lost count of how many girls I saw sporting this obnoxious shirt. I don't know who the blonde in the picture is, and neither do I want to, but I am dying to learn how it became acceptable for a tourist -- or anybody else -- to wear such a thing.

A substantial number of the passengers out on deck are smoking, and I am startled to see how many think nothing of flicking their butts into the water. This is true not only of the kids, but of the older passengers as well. Butts and litter too; I watch a Chinese guy flip his coffee cup into the Andaman. No surprise that the beaches on Phi Phi, stunning as they are, aren't exactly litter-free.

When finally we hit the pier at Phuket, I am ready to kiss the ground.

Phuket, by the way, is perhaps the only place on earth more disappointing than Phi Phi, with 10 times the tourists and a tenth of the natural beauty. But that's another story, and at any rate we won't be sticking around. Air Asia will be airlifting us to freedom at 6:40 p.m. I realize that I actually miss Bangkok -- sweaty, steam-cooked, traffic-snarled Bangkok -- something I never would have imagined.

All those things they say about travel: They are true, I suppose, but there is the demoralizing side of travel as well -- the side that drains away your strength and sucks away your faith in humanity. The side that makes you want to rush straight home and flush your passport down the toilet. It's not just the middle-finger T-shirts. It's the bigger things -- a trickle-down dysfunction that, perhaps, is what makes those ugly shirts popular in the first place: the filth, the poverty, the greed and despair -- the utter recklessness of it all.

Where to begin? Is there not something desperately wrong, for instance, in a world where everybody has a mobile telephone but nobody has clean drinking water?

On my final night in Bangkok, well past midnight, I am walking up Sukhumvit toward the Sheraton. Sukhumvit after dark is a poisonous kaleidoscope of flesh, fumes, noise and rubbish: the fluorescent-lit sidewalk stalls hawking crap of every conceivable size, color and shape; the sputtering buses and tuk-tuks; the countless winking whores; the lepers and limbless cripples begging for baht; the homeless toddlers curled against garbage pails. And the heat.

Up near Asok station, a tiny girl, perhaps 4 years old, is sitting on the ground next to an equally tiny puppy. Mind you it's about 2 o'clock in the morning. Both are adorable. The girl is wearing a frilly green dress, and the puppy has a small pail in its mouth. It's for photos. You take a picture of the girl and her dog, and you give her a few baht.

I bend down and touch the dog. He is docile but seems scared. He's much too young, I think, to be trained this way, and I wonder if maybe the pail is in fact stapled into his mouth. I could find out, but I'm afraid to.

Continuing toward the hotel, I can't stop thinking about the puppy. I resolve that I'm going to buy one of those tasty chicken kebabs from a street vendor and take it back to him. I am known to do such things, as I cannot stand the sight of neglected or abused animals. (Recall my story from Senegal about the injured hedgehog.)

But the food vendors all have shuttered for the night, and the next thing I know I'm flopped onto my bed with my sneakers still on.

I'm exhausted but I don't get undressed. I am trying to come up with a plan to get some food to the dog. There has to be a way. Should I keep looking for a kebab? Bring him some Pringles from the minibar? Grab something at the 7-Eleven? And what is it, I wonder, that makes me so concerned for the welfare of the dog over the welfare of the tiny girl?

It's all so depressing and fatiguing. And before I can decide what to do, I fall asleep.

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Photos from the author's trip to Phi Phi can be viewed here.  

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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his website and look for answers in a future column.

Although, sometimes we're just busy. It depends. Even after a great landing there might be some paperwork or other duty to attend to, and the door stays shut.

Rough landings? They happen once in a while, for any of several reasons. Sometimes, in strong winds or turbulence, they can't be avoided. In all but extreme cases a bumpy landing is by no means an unsafe one, and as I've said in the past, judging a flight by the smoothness of its touchdown is a bit like judging an entire chapter by virtue of a single word or punctuation mark. It's a small part of a much bigger picture.

Tradition holds that the pilot who performed the landing will stand in the doorway as passengers disembark, but in practice this varies. I made a silky-smooth touchdown in Europe the other day. I was busy packing up my things and the captain went to the door. He wound up getting all the kudos. 

Back in November, in a discussion of the Qantas emergency involving the Airbus A380, you wrote of the crew having to manually extend the landing gear. How is this done? 

All jetliners have a backup means of deploying their undercarriage. Usually it's a manual or electric release of the uplocks, in turn allowing the gear to free-fall into position without the aid of hydraulics. On newer planes the uplocks are freed simply by toggling a switch or two. On some older planes it was a more elaborate process involving hand-cranks affixed to the floor. Either way it's a clunkier process, and the bay doors may stay unfolded rather than closing up again as they normally would, meaning more drag, more noise, etc.

And if you've extended the gear this way due to a hydraulic failure, it'll be staying there. There is no such thing as a manual retraction (imagine, on a 747, trying to winch up 15 tons of struts, doors and tires by hand). In the event of a go-around or missed approach -- especially if you've also got a failed engine to deal with, as the Qantas pilots did -- the added drag can be a substantial, even hazardous performance hit.

Manually or hydraulically, by the way, all of the gear assemblies -- there are always at least three, nose and main -- operate together. You cannot raise or lower one set individually. 

Recently, on a flight from Denver to Phoenix, about 20 minutes after takeoff, the pilot slowed the engines, then lowered the landing gear for 30 seconds or so before retracting it again. Nothing was said. Any thoughts?

Troubleshooting. It's hard to say what the problem might have been, exactly, as landing gear operation varies somewhat from plane to plane, but chances are it was a doors issue. The last time this happened to me, one of the nose bay doors had not fully latched, and so the gear was "reset," so to speak. I can't imagine it was anything serious, but still the crew owed you an explanation. It irks me that you weren't given one.

Planes have maximum speeds for extension or retraction of the gear (mainly to protect the doors, not so much the struts and tires), which would explain why you heard the engines being powered back. 

You've written about automatic landings, and why they are so rare, but what about takeoffs? You recently stated, "There is no such thing as an automatic takeoff." Well, why not?

This is hard to explain, but the dynamics of takeoff are a lot different than the dynamics of landing. Part of it, too, is that visibility seldom drops low enough that you would require automation on takeoff. Even in heavy fog it is easier to maintain direction and visual contact with the runway as you're accelerating along its surface than it is trying to find that runway from hundreds of feet in the air, orient yourself correctly and land on it.

Takeoff is the most precarious, inherently dangerous moment of any flight, yes, but in certain ways it's a much easier maneuver than landing, and is not subject to as many restrictions. As a rule, visibility minimums for takeoff are much lower than they are for a manually flown (non-autoland) instrument approach. Most airlines and their pilots are certified for takeoffs with forward visibility as low as five or six hundred feet, versus the typical quarter-mile restriction for a standard ILS approach. In other words, the ability to take off automatically would require some very expensive, high-tech equipment that would hardly ever be used.

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They are not, however forced to claim their checked luggage or pass through customs and immigration. And the security staff I encountered were a lot friendlier and more professional than the average Transportation Security Administration guard. 

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That same trip to Asia found me riding on a 747 for the first time in a while. Best of all, I managed to score my first upper deck seating assignment since a trip to Kenya with British Airways way back in 1987. You should have seen me, like a little kid, asking the gate agent to swap my original seat for one upstairs. Why did it matter? Well, you need to be an airplane geek, maybe, to understand.

Though, just the same, I don't care how jaded or uninterested a flier you are, there is nothing like a ride on a 747. A380 nothing, the big Boeing remains the most exciting, most elegant machine in the sky -- an embodiment of everything that was, and is still, exciting about air travel.

As we taxied past a construction crew, the workmen stopped to watch. They wouldn't do that, I bet, for any other plane.

Sitting upstairs feels, how to say it, exclusive -- a private, hangar-shaped mini-cabin distinctly separate from the rest of the aircraft, with its own lavatories and galley. And who doesn't love those floor-level storage consoles? The spiral staircase, an iconic feature of older-model 747s, is gone now, replaced by a set of standard, ladder-style stairs, but climbing to the upper deck still provides a thrill. You are three full stories above the ground, and the view through the windows gives you a sense of the 747's size. Parked at the gate, you're looking at or over the rooftops of many terminals.

My full love letter to the Boeing 747 can be read here.

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Thanks to readers in Thailand we've been able to get some clarification on how to pronounce "Suvarnabhumi," the name of the sensational new airport in Bangkok. It's "Soo-Wanna-Poom."

Just like it's spelled, right? How do you come up with a transliteration with three silent letters? What do I know about languages, but shouldn't it be phonetic?

I like it, though. It's tons more interesting than, say, "Bangkok International."

I wonder if it's only a matter of time before we get corporations sponsoring airport names, as they do with sports stadiums. One possible upside: no more partisan politics on the airfield. So long to JFK and Reagan-National; welcome instead to "Comcast New York International" and "Staples-National."

Just you wait.

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 Mike Potter passed away a few weeks ago of a heart attack.

Mike Potter was a retired TWA captain and the de facto caretaker of one of aviation's most peculiar and interesting places -- the airliner boneyard out at Mojave, Calif. There he oversaw the desiccated hulks of retired jetliners, guiding enthusiasts on occasional guided tours. I met Potter at Mojave in 2006, when I was there with a film crew shooting footage for the Discovery Channel. My visit is described in this column, in which I wrote of our host:

"Potter is, let's just say, a large fellow, with a waterfall white beard and a way of speaking that is both warmly engaging and hotly irascible. He's got the looks of Karl Marx, the raffish drawl of Yeager, and a touch of charismatic nuttiness. Potter seems professionally detached from the machines he so obviously loves, but yet, according to the rules of his job, must occasionally destroy. Motioning toward a sun-bleached row of planes, there's a sad seriousness in his eyes -- like a marine biologist encountering a pod of stranded whales on a beach."

He loved planes, what can you say? And the world of aviation is a little less colorful without him.

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 And they say passengers don't dress up to fly anymore. Here's a description of somebody I saw the other day in Terminal B at Boston's Logan International Airport:

He was a white kid in his early 20s. He walked with one of those shuffling, gangsta-style gaits. His jeans were halfway to his knees, the top of his boxer shorts billowing out the back. He wore a bootleg Johnny Cash T-shirt, with the name "Cash" in huge block letters and a picture of Johnny sticking his middle finger at you. Rounding out this classy ensemble was a zip-up gray sweat shirt decorated with the black silhouettes of assault weapons.

I'll give you a choice. Spend three hours on a plane sitting next to a colicky baby, or sitting next to this guy.

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 If, like me, you keep your fingers tight against the pulse of popular culture, you know that rapper Jay-Z has a new book out. It's called "Decoded." The publisher is a Random House imprint called Spiegel and Grau.

The "Grau" portion of that name, incidentally, belongs to a woman named Julie Grau. Before moving to Random House, Grau had been a founding vice president of a Penguin imprint called Riverhead Books. Somewhere on her résumé is a title called "Ask the Pilot: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel," by Patrick Smith.

I suspect that my book is not one of Grau's career-defining moments. Though maybe it could have been. While she was steering Riverhead, my book was suffocating in the dusty "Transportation" racks at Barnes & Noble, where it remains to this day, cleverly hidden from its target audience. I take it Jay-Z's work is consigned to the "Linguistics" section?

Didn't think so.

Though maybe it's not a bad thing, at this point, that my book sits invisibly in those dark, unmolested corners of the store. Considering how out-of-date the content is, I'd be just as happy to pallet up the remaining copies and toss them into the sea. Most of "Ask the Pilot" was written in 2002-2003. If you haven't noticed, the world of commercial aviation has since been through a few changes. As it stands, half of Chapter 7 is devoted to discussions of airlines that no longer exist. My security essay in Chapter 4, perhaps the book's strongest segment, was written before the TSA even existed! For eight years I've been writing about TSA here on Salon, yet nowhere in the book -- the integrity of "the security checks" is bullet-pointed on the back cover -- do the letters "TSA" appear.

With all of the focus on air travel these days, I am convinced that I could sell a half-million copies of a fresh new edition, taking in not just airport security issues, but all of the controversial air travel topics of the past eight years. (Talk about a perfect e-book for travelers and their Kindles.) Unfortunately, convincing Riverhead of this has proved roughly as easy as chiseling out the wisdom teeth of an angry tiger.

You can read the full saga here.

I could be totally wrong. Maybe "Ask the Pilot" isn't lyrical enough for mainstream appeal? I've considered a rap version, but I can't find any words that rhyme with "Airbus" or "transponder." Maybe Jay-Z can help.

I notice that the cover of "Decoded" features a Rorschach-y inkblot designed by Andy Warhol. I like the Grant Hart version better.

That long-forgotten Hüsker Dü album, by the way, features a song called "Gravity," the last 30 seconds of which are perhaps the most mesmerizing 30 seconds of the entire 1980s.

Which reminds me: Dec. 26 was the 26th anniversary of the greatest concert I ever saw -- an impromptu Hüsker Dü show at a place called Harvey Wheeler Hall, out in Concord, Mass. It was a last-minute gig arranged by David Savoy, a Concord native who also was the band's manager at the time (and whose suicide a few years later was partly responsible for their breakup). There was no stage; the band set up on the floor of what, in my memory, was a simple classroom. There were maybe 60 people there. We stood or sat cross-legged.

The set ended when Grant cut his finger on a cracked drumstick during a cover of "Ticket to Ride." I remember my best friend at the time, Mark McKay (later the drummer for the hardcore group Slapshot), giving him a Band-Aid. After the show we went backstage, as it were, and chatted a while with Grant, Bob and Greg.

A few weeks ago, Paul Hilcoff, who hosts the painfully exhaustive Hüsker Dü fan site, mailed me a compact disc recording of that entire concert. What a startling feeling that is, to discover, many years on, that an actual recording exists of one of your most cherished memories.

Except, whether in spite or because of this, the CD sits on my bookshelf, as yet unlistened-to. One of these days, maybe, I will summon up the courage to actually play it. Listening to that recording, provided I've got the emotional muster, will be the closest I ever get to time travel.

That's a sure sign of getting old, I think: a fear of getting too close to your past.

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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his website and look for answers in a future column.

I am not making this up. And we are asked to imagine a terrorist attempting to hijack a plane with a set of plastic kiddie wings.

Granted, it's nice to see the wings again -- assuming there's a kid somewhere who is still made happy by such small gestures. Just as passengers can once again enjoy their first-class entrees with actual metal cutlery. Somebody, somewhere, was sane enough to let this happen.

But somebody else was daft enough to outlaw these things in the first place. And rest assured such silliness will happen again. Lesson being: Never, ever underestimate the American capacity for shameless overreaction. We see it on all scales, from the dropping of bombs to the prohibition of harmless trinkets for young children.

At least, in the meantime, we are protected from the menace of snow globes.

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Another thing that our insane preoccupation with safety and security has helped ruin: the idea of passengers from other countries using the United States as a stopover point.

Why does the U.S. not recognize the concept of being in transit, as pretty much everywhere else in the world does? Instead, all foreigners arriving in the United States, even if they are merely in transit to a third nation, must pass through immigration, claim their bags, and be rescreened by TSA before proceeding onward to their connecting flight.

For example, flying from New York to Bangkok, with a change of planes in Tokyo, one does not "enter" Japan. You never leave the secure transit area, and your luggage is transferred automatically to the next flight. It's quick, convenient and painless. Passing through Europe, same thing. By contrast, a person flying from, say, London to Costa Rica, via Miami, faces a hostile marathon of lines and checkpoints in Miami. First you have to clear customs and immigration. This means a fingerprinting and having your picture taken (and many foreign nationals require a visa, even if they're just passing through). Next, you are forced to claim and recheck all of your luggage. And lastly, of course, comes the TSA screening, where you are liable to have your duty-free items confiscated, among other indignities.

Yes, you've been through security already, when you left Europe or Asia or wherever you're coming from. And yes, now you will go through it again, TSA-style. This applies to all connecting passengers, including U.S. citizens. The government's reasoning is that passengers now have access to checked luggage, and could theoretically remove some hazardous item from a bag and sneak it into one of their carry-ons. No effort is made to segregate those with checked bags from those without, and so everybody has to endure this nonsense. Not even crew members are exempt. Coming in off an 11-hour flight, I need to pass through a full TSA screening just for the chance to stow my flight case in the crew lounge. (This while the baggage loaders and caterers saunter through unmolested, but that's another story and don't get me started.)

All together this obstacle course can easily take 90 minutes or more, not counting visa and paperwork hassles beforehand. And this is one of the reasons that a dwindling number of foreigners book connecting tickets via the United States anymore.

What the benefits of this system might be, if any, I can't say. The idea that we're "safer" is an extremely tough sell. But the downside is obvious: millions, if not billions of dollars in lost commerce -- not to mention a loss of respect. U.S. airlines miss out on millions of annual passengers. Flying from Australia to Europe, just to pick one example, people could easily connect via Los Angeles or San Francisco instead of in Asia or the Middle East. But few, if any, do. And who can blame them?

Airports like those in Singapore and Dubai and all throughout Europe efficiently process tens of millions of transit passengers each year. All down the line people benefit, from the passengers themselves to the airlines and vendors they patronize. American terminals should be set up this way also.

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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his website and look for answers in a future column.