12/14/2001 - Updated 12:27 AM ET Passengers uneasy with pat-downs

By Kitty Bean Yancey, USA TODAY

By Sue Ogrocki, Reuters A United Airlines employee is searched at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. Related story Three Concourses closed at Logan in two separate incidents It's touch and go at the airport now. Just ask everyday travelers pulled out of line at security checkpoints in these days of ratcheted-up scrutiny and random searches. Pittsburgh grandmother Marguerite Petito was "totally embarrassed" recently in Chicago when a wand beeped, "and the lady asked if it was OK for her to feel my breasts to make sure I was not hiding anything," she recalls. "This she did in front of all these men that were in line. ... I thought, 'Here I am getting felt up in the middle of O'Hare airport!' " The suspicious metal turned out to be the underwire of her bra. Thursday, a passenger at Boston's Logan airport refused a screening and bolted after her bra set off a metal detector. She was let go after being questioned by police. Their close encounters are not isolated ones. With more wands waving at airports than in any Harry Potter tale, running the gantlet of newly toughened screenings can mean allowing the liberties generally accorded only to a date, mate or doctor.

-- Anonymous, December 14, 2001

Answers

Expect congressional legislation banning metal underwires. The bra industry will be turned upside down as it scrambles to find sources for plastic underwires!

Maybe it’s time to burn our bras again. ;)

-- Anonymous, December 15, 2001

Bra? What bra? Heck, I burned mine back in the 60's and seldom wear one even now.

-- Anonymous, December 15, 2001

Jay Leno says that since the pat downs at the airports commenced, Richard Simmons has been flying 8 times a day.

-- Anonymous, December 15, 2001

LOL, Barefoot & Beckie!

Thanks to whomever posted this (forgot, sorry).

If life does call upon me to fly in the near future, I will make sure that I don't wear or carry an underwire bra.

For that matter, I won't take anything beyond clothing, a plastic comb and toothbrush, and a couple of mainsteam, G-rated paperbacks. Think that'll bore security enough to ignore me? I don't fit any profiles, and I'm not good-looking enough to warrant a pat-down by a horny security guy.

-- Anonymous, December 15, 2001