Aw: TSA chief visits screeners at Reagan airport to boost morale

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, he was greeted in the airport by T.S.A. employees, whom he fist-bumped and thanked for their hard work, and who beamed and thanked him back. “Thank you for standing behind us,” said the woman checking IDs. Later, two young T.S.A. officers approached him to say, “Thanks for everything you’re doing for us, dealing with all this media stuff.”…

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Mr. Pistole received a modified pat-down, but said he had experienced the real thing, both before he approved the procedure and as a traveler. “It is effective,” he said. “It is thorough in the way it’s designed to be, to detect those types of devices that can bring down an airplane.”

So is it something he would want his wife to undergo?

“You say, do I want?” asked Mr. Pistole, who has no Thanksgiving travel plans other than to maybe visit another airport. “In an ideal world, nobody would need to undergo a pat-down because our technology would be so precise and our intelligence about how we are identifying travelers so informed that nobody would need a pat-down. But that’s not the world we live in.”

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