Air Safety Dog and Pony Show Continues

The so-called airline safety experts at the TSA have decided that the risk posed by lighters and matches has passed, so that they will no longer be confiscating those items at security checkpoints at airports around the country.

Screeners at U.S. airports will stop confiscating common cigarette lighters because authorities now consider them a distraction from efforts to find bombs and other threats, officials said on Friday.

The 2005 prohibition was a response to the attempt four years earlier by Briton Richard Reid to bring down an American Airlines jet with a shoe bomb.

Lighters are the most confiscated item at airport security checkpoints -- about 22,000 per day, the Homeland Security Department's Transportation Security Administration said. The number has gone as high as 35,000.

But authorities say security resources need to be focused even more closely in specific areas, most notably bomb detection. The security agency previously has taken steps to reorder screener priorities -- like lifting the ban on small scissors -- to emphasize bomb detection.

"Explosives remain the most significant threat to aviation," Kip Hawley, the TSA administrator, said in a statement.

Congress has permitted the change after initially ordering the lighter ban. It is set to be lifted on August 4.

Torch lighters, which burn hotter and tend to be used for pipes and cigars, will still not be allowed in the passenger cabin.

Explosives remain the most serious threat, but it is far from the only one. An inventive terrorist could take advantage of this change just as surely as they could do before Richard Reid highlighted the need to look closely at the kinds of items brought on board airlines.

What's next? Some time in the future will the TSA determine that liquid explosives are no longer the threat they once were and drop the existing requirements? The threat is still there and the terrorists are nothing if not inventive. After all, they didn't use anything more sophisticated than box cutters to hijack the four planes on 9/11.

Smoking is not permitted on all flights, and the need for a lighter on board is nonexistent. Changing this rule makes little sense as it could be used as a trigger for a weapon.

Oh, and matches are still permitted on airlines, despite the fact that Reid himself tried to light his shoe bomb with a match.