cww.blog!

During my travels this past weekend, I received the free government massage in Dallas, Boston, and Baltimore, as a result of having the mysterious "SSSS" symbol on my boarding passes. I just Googled something involving SSSS and found a Today's Engineer article that says the following.

One-way air tickets are considered suspect and carry an "SSSS" code on boarding passes, requiring a full-body wanding of the hapless passenger. This also applies for round trips, using different carriers for the two legs, and even to code-share flights where one carrier issues the ticket, but a shared carrier is used for one one-way segment. The second carrier must issue a "SSSS" boarding pass. The logic seems to be that a terrorist planning a suicide mission would not buy a round-trip ticket if he did not plan to use the return part, in the interest of economy.

I was travelling on two one-way tickets. I guess that's why I got the symbol.

It doesn't explain why I would have gotten the symbol on the return flight from Pittsburgh the first time I visited, though.

Anyway, read that article. It contains all kinds of interesting stuff on airport security.