When Flying Involved Little to No Airport Security

Boarding an airplane in the early days of commercial air travel was no different than hopping on a train or bus. Passengers walked right up to the plane with their ticket—there was no need for bag checks or even an ID.  

Things started to change in the 1960s after a string of hijackings rattled the airline industry. Still, as late as the 1990s, airport security wasn’t much more than metal detectors and X-ray machines staffed by private security companies.  

"It was a relatively unintrusive process,” says Jeffrey Price, an aviation security expert. “Anybody could go through the checkpoint. You didn't need to be a passenger, so you could go right to the gate to drop off your loved ones or pick them up. You didn't need ID. A long screening line would've been considered about 5 to 8 minutes.”  

Then came September 11, 2001, when 19 hijackers crashed four airplanes in a coordinated attack that claimed nearly 3,000 lives. Under the newly created Transportation Security Administration (TSA), airport security became a matter of national security. 

Here’s a timeline of some of the most important developments in airport security.  

Signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the act created the Federal Aviation Agency (renamed the Federal Aviation Administration in 1967) to oversee all commercial flights and regulate airline safety. In 1955, a man named Jack Graham hid a bomb in his mother’s luggage to collect her life insurance policy. Forty-four passengers were killed in the first bombing of a U.S. airplane.   

On May 1, 1961, Antulio Ramirez Ortiz boarded a National Airlines flight in Miami with a knife and a revolver. He ordered the pilot to fly to Cuba. It was the first in a string of hijackings that year. In August, President John F. Kennedy ordered armed Border Patrol officers to ride on “a number of our flights.”   

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy swore in the first “peace officers,” specially trained U.S. Deputy Marshals who would patrol flights when requested by the airline or the FBI. The “Sky Marshals,” as they were later called, became a permanent force of airline security officers in 1970. In 1964, the FAA ordered that the cockpit doors of large commercial flights be locked.  

“There was a spate of hijackings between 1968 and 1972,” says Price. “In some cases, there were one to two hijackings per week—it was getting that bad.”  

Both domestic and international flights were targeted by hijackers, including a 1969 incident when Palestinian hijackers diverted a TWA flight leaving Rome for Syria.  

In response to the hijacking crisis, the FAA developed some of its first passenger screening protocols. These included metal detectors to find weapons and the creation of a “hijacker psychological profile” to flag potential agitators. Eastern Airlines was the first to follow the new security protocols, which weren’t yet mandatory. 

The FAA launched the Explosives Detection Canine Team Program in 1972 after a bomb-sniffing dog successfully located a bomb on a TWA flight from New York. By 1977, bomb-sniffing dogs were stationed at 29 major U.S. airports.  

Starting on January 5, 1973, the FAA required that all carry-on luggage had to be X-rayed for weapons and passengers needed to be scanned by a metal detector.  

Price says that there still wasn’t a separate security area at the airport. Each airline was responsible for screening its own passengers, which usually happened at the gate.  

“They just rolled a magnetometer right in front of the gate and you were screened as you went down the jet bridge,” says Price. “Eventually they established what we know today as a ‘sterile area,’ and that would mature through the early to mid 1970s.”  

After the introduction of passenger screening, the Sky Marshal program went into decline, says Price. But that changed with the hijacking of TWA Flight 847. Over 17 days in the summer of 1985, Lebanese hijackers forced the crew to make multiple flights from Beirut to Algiers while holding 153 passengers hostage. One passenger, a Navy diver named Robert Stethem, was killed.  

“The hijacking of TWA Flight 847 became notorious because it was one of the first hijackings covered on TV," says Price.  

In response, Federal Air Marshals—successors to the Sky Marshals—were required on all international flights.  

The Aviation and Transportation Security Act was signed into law by President George W. Bush just two months after the September 11^th attacks. It put the federal government in charge of security at all U.S. airports. Before that, says Price, the airlines were responsible for screening passengers, which was contracted out to private security firms.  

The law created the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), an entirely new federal agency charged with securing the nation’s skies. Some of the first TSA regulations banned certain items from carry-on luggage, including box cutters—a weapon used by the September 11^th hijackers. Cockpit doors were also reinforced and locked from the inside.  

The first federalized airport was Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI).  

Before the TSA, everyone was allowed past airport security. Family and friends accompanied travelers to their gates and met them as soon as they landed. Picture IDs weren’t required by airport security until 2002, when only ticketed passengers were allowed past security.  

Just two months after the September 11^th attacks, a man named Richard Reid boarded an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami with explosives hidden in the soles of his shoes. When Reid tried to detonate the bombs mid-flight, he was tackled by passengers and crew members.  

Five years later, in 2006, the TSA began requiring passengers to remove their shoes before walking through the metal detectors. Price says that conventional metal detectors at the time couldn’t detect explosives at floor level. That’s not an issue for today’s full-body scanners, known as millimeter wave scanners. Thanks to those advances, as of July 9, 2025, passengers at TSA checkpoints no longer need to remove their shoes.

Also in 2006, the TSA briefly banned all liquids from carry-ons. That’s because British authorities foiled a plot to blow up a plane with liquid explosives. The liquid ban was later eased to allow small containers of liquids weighing 3.4 ounces or less.