A gray hooded sweatshirt and an unexpected mid-summer downpour nearly stopped Yuriy Geyer from boarding his plane back to Northwestern for the start of the school year.
The Music sophomore from St. Petersburg, Fla., had pulled his sweatshirt hood over his head to shield him from the rain, but a ticket counter supervisor saw his beard and mistook him for an Arab American.
After a few minutes of questions about his destination, Geyer convinced the airline worker that his black case contained a violin and not a bomb, and she allowed him to continue on to his gate.
“I had a beard, so they thought I was a suspicious character,” Geyer said. “It’s inconvenient, but it’s a necessary safety precaution. I just thought it was kind of funny.”
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks snarled air traffic for days, NU students straggled onto campus last week by train, car or bus, hoping to avoid the massive flight cancellations that plagued the nation’s airports.
But for the students who decided to brave hours-long lines and catch a plane back to campus, one thing remains clear: Heightened security measures have irrevocably changed the face of flying.
One day after terrorist attacks rocked the nation, with the charred rubble of the World Trade Center still smoldering in New York, Joe Weiss loaded his clothes and fencing gear into his blue 1997 Buick and began the 1,000-mile trip back to NU.
The Weinberg senior had planned to drive back to campus long before the attacks, but this time, he said, the trip felt different: It was as if he was abandoning his hometown.
“All this attention was being paid to New York suddenly,” he said. “The focus of the country was shifting and I was heading in the opposite direction.”
When the World Trade Center collapsed, Weiss said he could see a plume of smoke rising from Manhattan. His former high school, five blocks from the scene, was used as a triage center for the wounded in the wake of the attack.
At airports across the country, security measures that would have been unthinkable last month now are commonplace.
New regulations ban curbside check-in, subject passengers to random searches of their checked or carry-on luggage, and keep people without a ticket from entering the boarding area.
Passengers show their identification at the ticket counter and at “security checkpoints” around the airport.
Airlines are asking passengers to arrive two hours early and to be prepared to wait.
At the Oakland (Calif.) International Airport on a recent Saturday, airline workers donned latex gloves to meticulously inspect a man’s check-in luggage.
The businessman stood silently as the attendant ran her gloved fingers through his plastic-covered business suits and ties before zipping up the bag and placing it behind the counter.
The man shrugged before picking up his briefcase and walking toward his gate.
Near the airport’s metal detectors, a security guard searched a teenager in flip flops for weapons before allowing her to re-join her mother and head to her gate.
Kelly Huseby, a McCormick sophomore from Scottsdale, Ariz., said she called American Airlines for three days after the terrorist attacks but received nothing but busy signals. Desperate to reschedule her flight, she drove to Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport and waited in a two-hour line to talk to a ticket agent.
Her new flight reached NU on Sunday without incident. Huseby said she barely noticed the new security regulations.
“It was actually a really good flight,” she said. “At the end, everyone clapped.”
