How 9/11 transformed air security forever — even as some measures go by the wayside

Smoke rises from the burning twin towers of the World Trade Center after hijacked planes crashed into the towers, Sept. 11, 2001, in New York. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP-Richard Drew – The Canadian Press

About a week after the 9/11 attacks, Jeff Price found a flight back to Colorado from Hawaii, where he’d been attending a conference when North American airspace abruptly closed following the worst terror strike in American history.

“The pilot came over the intercom and said, ‘We’re going to get you home safely, and I want to see if I can count on you so if anything happens … you’ll help us out,'” Price recalled.

“That was kind of a shock.”

The request for help in case of hijacking drove home what the aviation security expert already knew: the travel security landscape had, overnight, shifted drastically and irrevocably.

In the days and years that followed, the sleepy screening processes previously in place at North American airports and airlines morphed into a gauntlet of checkpoints and protocols, triggering a permanent shift in how travellers fly and Canadian authorities approach security in the skies.

Nearly 25 years ago, 19 al-Qaida-affiliated hijackers strolled through metal detectors at U.S. airports armed with knives and mace before commandeering four commercial jetliners. They flew two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, a third into the Pentagon and another into a field in Pennsylvania, killing almost 3,000 people.

Before Sept. 11, passengers on domestic flights could pass through a cursory security screening and reach the gate without brandishing a boarding pass or identification. They could often board without showing ID at all.

A Canadian Air Transport Security Authority employee screens a suitcase during a demonstration of a new CT X-ray machine at the Vancouver International Airport in Richmond B.C., on Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ethan Cairns

“Before 9/11, travel was fun,” said Price, a professor at the Metropolitan State University of Denver and former assistant security director at the city’s airport.

“It was an exciting adventure to go on a plane. You went to the airport, the checkpoint was a minor inconvenience — not a major part of the trip — and you could walk to the gate with your loved ones, your friends,” he said.

“The whole process itself was relatively seamless.”

But there were drawbacks as well, including a relatively lax approach to traveller screening across the continent.

“You often had minimum wage employees with varying degrees of training,” said Margaret Bloodworth, who was Canada’s deputy minister of transport in 2001. “It was a very mixed bag as to what you had at every airport.”

Airlines in Canada and the U.S. at the time were responsible for passenger screening, often contracting the job to security firms who served the carriers’ goal of providing a pleasant, hassle-free experience.

Now, agents employed by the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority — created in April 2002 — handle the job. The Crown corporation outsources to private firms such as GardaWorld and Paladin, but they operate under a standardized national security and training regime.

In the years after 2001, more rigorous security checks came into force that called for shoes off, laptops out and liquids limited to 100 millilitres, plus a ban on small knives — blades of up to 10 centimetres had previously been allowed. On board, the metal utensils vanished.

“Lines started getting longer as it took screeners longer to look at bags,” said Price.

People line up before entering the security at Pearson International Airport in Toronto on Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

Airlines also had to adjust, installing reinforced cockpit doors by April 2003 and barring visits to the flight deck. Employees were subject to more random screening and flight attendants were trained in emergency code words and how to spot suspicious items. Air cargo security ramped up and American air marshals and their RCMP counterparts blended with regular passengers to watch for fishy behaviour on board.

“The biggest change that occurred after 9/11 was all those safety measures,” said Benoit Gauthier, a pilot with Air Canada for 37 years before he retired in 2010.

In the initial weeks, the uncertainty and absence of formalized procedures pushed some security officials to the brink of paranoia.

“I remember one of my colleagues had his shaving razor taken away from him at security in Vancouver or Calgary,” Gauthier recalled.

“‘Jesus, do you know what we have in the cockpit?’ the colleague asked the screening officer. ‘We have a great big fire axe.’ And then the (officer) really panicked. He called the RCMP.”

More recently, some of the more intrusive aspects of screening have been scaled back, thanks largely to technology.

Footwear removal at Canadian airports became less common in 2009 after ramping up three years earlier in line with a mandatory U.S. shoes-off policy, which followed a failed shoe bombing attempt on an American Airlines flight in December 2001. U.S. authorities scrapped the requirement last year, though security officers in both countries have the discretion to demand it.

CT X-ray scanners now operate in 10 Canadian airports, from Halifax to Vancouver. The tubular machines provide detailed 3D images of baggage and, by measuring their chemical composition, sniff out explosives. Passengers in those lines can often avoid pulling out their laptops and liquids.

However, the multiple checks of tickets and IDs remain, as do time-consuming lines at peak travel times.

“I remember days where I’d show up at the airport 15 minutes prior to departure and still make the flight,” said John Gradek, who teaches aviation management at McGill University.

“Now it’s no longer the case. Don’t even try it in under two hours.”

Biometrics have made trips more seamless in recent years, but also raised privacy and ethics concerns.

Air Canada rolled out facial recognition technology at the gate in December 2024, making it the first Canadian airline to deploy the software in a bid to streamline the boarding process.

Customers who board some domestic Air Canada flights at the Vancouver airport and Toronto’s Pearson can walk onto the plane without presenting any physical pieces of identification, such as a passport or driver’s licence.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection also relies on the technology during preclearance in Canadian airports for select cross-border flights.

Worries about the software, which analyzes the unique physical identifiers of a passenger’s face, revolve partly around how the systems are trained and what happens when they fail to recognize travellers.

“It’s also privacy and control of this data. Who gets to see the data? Will it be eliminated? How is the data flow going to be managed?” asked Gradek.

“It’s the latest stage in a series of security changes that all really started on 9/11.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 30, 2026.

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Christopher Reynolds, The Canadian Press

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