Banned lighters may be flying high again

Momentum is building to lift the Congressional ban on cigarette lighters aboard airplanes, which took effect in April 2005. Since then, security screeners have confiscated 16 million lighters, which typically cost $1 to $2 each unless they are luxury models.
It costs the government $6 million to dispose of the lighters, about $4 million more than it cost to get rid of all confiscated items before the lighter ban, according to the Transportation Security Administration.
Two weeks ago, Kip Hawley, the head of the TSA, met with members of Congress in classified briefings to discuss threats to transportation. He mentioned re-examining the lighter ban, the Kansas City Star reports.
A bill pending in Congress would allow the TSA to lift the ban if it could show that airline safety would not be jeopardized.
“The TSA believes the lighter ban does not add to security any longer, and removing the ban would actually enhance security,” TSA spokeswoman Carrie Harmon told the newspaper.
TSA screeners collect roughly 30,000 lighters a day nationwide, Harmon says, about 80 percent of all prohibited items collected.
“The time that we spend looking through bags looking for lighters detracts from the time we could be spending looking for items that are a serious threat,” Harmon says.
The TSA bans more than 60 items from being carried onto an airplane, including box cutters, knives, guns, ice picks, saws and hammers. On its own, the agency can revise that list, as it did last year when it began allowing passengers to carry small scissors and some tools aboard planes.
Lighters are the only item prohibited by Congress. Harmon says only Congress can lift the restriction.
Lawmakers are moving toward lifting the ban they passed in 2004, three years after Richard Reid tried to ignite explosives in his shoes on an overseas flight.
A section of a new bill funding the Department of Homeland Security would allow the TSA to lift the ban if it could show Congress that screening operations would improve. Some aviation experts think the lighter ban was misguided from the outset. They note that there are many other more serious threats to security.
“Because there’s such a vacuum in security planning, every congressman has his own crackpot scheme of what security should be,” Michael Boyd, an aviation consultant from Evergreen, Colo., tells the newspaper. “If you’re going to take anything that could conceivably be used to damage an airplane off an airplane, we wouldn’t carry any passengers,” adds Boyd, president of the consulting firm The Boyd Group.
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, wrote the lighter ban. “Sen. Wyden has said he’d listen to arguments in favor of lifting the ban,” spokesman Geoff Stuckart says. “His bottom-line concern is the overall safety of our aviation system, not the preservation of one particular screening method over another.”