Is it a Philly thing?
Are complaints about strange security screenings at the airport something you'll find across the country, or is there a particular problem here?
I can't give you statistical certainty on this. But when you listen to frequent fliers like Quality Quinn, you have to wonder.
"There is something wrong with the culture at this airport," Quinn, a 55-year-old educational consultant, told me last week.
For 20 years she has flown around the country, giving talks on literacy, and in January she moved from Austin, Texas, to Philadelphia.
"Never in my life have I experienced what I go through almost every other week at the Philadelphia airport," she said. "I have had the most excruciating, embarrassing [screenings] there."
She called me after my column last Monday about retired professor Nancy Anne Phillips, who complained that before an April flight an airport screener's wand made contact with her crotch.
The TSA has reviewed a tape of that encounter and concluded its security officer did nothing inappropriate. The agency has since erased the tape.
Quinn said she, too, had endured a recent wanding that went too far.
So did Fayette Veverka, a Villanova University theology professor.
And Lynne Lechter, a King of Prussia lawyer who has run for the state House.
"I cannot stress enough that this behavior has not been encountered in any of the other cities from which I have gone through security," Lechter wrote last week to US Airways CEO Doug Parker.
Lechter was complaining about an April 19 flight to Raleigh-Durham International Airport. She isn't sure why, after she went through the metal detector, she was selected for a secondary screening.
But she said in an interview that the woman holding the wand had run it up and down the inside of her legs - Lechter was wearing a skirt - and that Lechter had found it "sexually suggestive."
Worse, she said, "a leering man watched the entire search." When she complained to a supervisor at a desk, he investigated, but the man was gone, Lechter said.
Like Phillips, she declined a private screening. "The last thing I wanted to do was go in a private room," Lechter said. "I'd rather have the public humiliation."
Veverka said she was heading for an early-morning flight to Cleveland on June 11 when her metal replacement knees set off the alarms.
"I had on a loose skirt," the professor said, and when the female screener wanded her, "I just jumped. I was like, 'Excuse me?' . . . I just found it very invasive."
