Today I am raising Alternative Building Ideas to new heights and taking a little break from the Home Made Ph.D.

About 15 years ago I had an idea about airline safety – specifically, concerning bombs smuggled in luggage taking planes down . Since then you can’t avoid reading, or hearing first hand, stories of passenger inconveniences, hours of waiting around in terminals and…well, you know the mess that has been generated, and continues, at airports by the threat of terrorist acts.

Instead of all that, imagine this. You arrive at the terminal with your luggage. You go to a counter and check in. Then you walk to a special container full of storage compartments and place your luggage in one, shoes too if the terror alert is high. Possibly your carry-on bag would go in there too. Then you proceed directly to the plane and take your seat.

At your destination you exit the plane, walk directly to this special container, retrieve your luggage and you’re on your way. No waiting on either end of your journey, no baggage searches, x-rays, body pat downs or stress, other than the natural fear of flying many of us have.

The special container is a sleek little glider towed behind the passenger plane. With the baggage in the glider the worry about a suitcase, or anything big enough to be a bomb, is gone. If the glider blows up you lose some luggage but the airlines do that all the time anyway. In fact, since no one handles your bags except you the chances of losing luggage is pretty near zero.

When I thought of this I wrote to several airlines and the President of the United States, at the time, George Herbert Walker Bush. All I got were polite but condescending letters of thanks for my interest from low level staff people. One airline did send a $25 gift certificate. You can understand what a waste of time that felt like.

Since then I have brought up this subject with most anyone I’ve met who has anything to do with the airline business and not one person has had a logical reason why it would not work. Some even had good reasons I had not considered.

Next time I’ll talk about the benefits of the Luggage Glider. For now, if you have constructive thoughts on this send them along. I have to believe there other people out there who can think outside the flight envelope.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 4:55 am and is filed under Alternative Building Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.