Before all those hijackings, there was no airport security screening. None at all! I know that's hard to believe, but we've all gotten used to it since we've had something in place now for about 40 years.
There has to be something we can do to ensure safety, but that's less overbearing than today's TSA.
The world is a dangerous place, absolute safety is an unachievable pipe dream. The only thing we an ensuring is that that we have our rights violated and our time wasted by government agents that we pay for.
If we really wanted to be safer, we'd stop creating droves of new enemies every day in our pursuit of global military empire. Most of my fellow Americans remain blissfully unaware that we are bombing people, arming jihadists, and backing dictators every day, but the people getting bombed and oppressed are quite aware of what is what.
Its inevitable that we are going to continue facing blowback for our actions, but unfortunately its heresy for the masters of conventional wisdom to admit that their policies make life more dangerous for everyone.
There still isn't for non-international flights in New Zealand. Show up at the airport 15 minutes before your flight, check your luggage, print your ticket, and walk to your gate.
The security at Ben Gurion does a cursory "I'm looking at your bags" check but they mostly just profile people by asking them questions and looking at their responses. There's something like 4 or 5 points of contact with a security team member where they just ask questions. Once they suspect someone due to how they've reacted or answered poorly, then they divert people away that section of the airport and continue business as normal. They also have a curb-to-airplane average time of something like 25 minutes.
Before 2001, I'd always ask the pilots to let me sit in the cockpit during takeoff. If they said no, they'd often offer a tour of the cockpit when cruising instead.
I think at this point we have all the technology to replace most air travel with a network of autonomous family-sized aircraft hopping between cities within a few hundred miles, probably not costing much more than a Greyhound ticket.
Then the big security threat shifts from what a hijacker can do with a jet packed full of humans and fuel to what a hacker can do by seizing control of the whole network, but the travel experience itself wouldn't need such invasive screening.
And if it took any longer, I'd make this journey even less.
302,382 people flew from SFO to Europe in May 2016. That's a lot of people. Almost 5% of the Bay Area population and there are 2 more international airports in the region. [0]
Collectively far more people are flying from San Francisco to Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Portland, and Seattle each month. If they could all show up at the airport 5 minutes early, hop in a tiny drone-jet with 3-4 other passengers and take off, not having to deal with security would be icing on the cake in terms of convenience.
I don't think the parent was suggesting that his idea should be the only solution... just that it would be a solution that would work for many use cases (and could exist in combination with larger long haul flights).
Another tactic that might help would be completely separating checked baggage from passenger flights. I.e. you check your bags the day before and they go on a cargo network. More time for screening, cargo planes are less valuable targets (although they still have been attacked), cargo containers could be armored, and passenger-only planes would be easier to secure since the only way to smuggle something would be on your person or in your body.
Even if you could theoretically reduce airport connection time to zero between flights, a lot of time is spent just getting the aircraft to speed, and slowing down to land (all that gravitational potential energy has to go somewhere, after all).
Same principle applies to express trains, and dwell times at stations. The benefit of high speed is lost just decelerating and accelerating from every stop it has to make.
Go watch Total Recall, the scene where he walks past the security detail which the skeletal outline. Pretty sure we will get there. There is no reason a computer cannot real time draw an inoffensive view of any person and item moving past. https://youtu.be/7CX9Agzeh-c
Before all those hijackings, there was no airport security screening. None at all! I know that's hard to believe, but we've all gotten used to it since we've had something in place now for about 40 years.
There has to be something we can do to ensure safety, but that's less overbearing than today's TSA.