Another reason to hate terrorists

We got what seemed like a good break yesterday when our San Juan-to-Philadelphia flight got in about a half-hour early, giving us a chance to catch an earlier plane home to Albany than the one we were booked on.

But the federal Transportation Safety Administration thought it was too risky.

US Airways employees told us that there was space on the earlier flight for us, but they couldn't let us on because our bags were checked onto the later flight. We'll just pick them up the next day, we said. Nope, we were told, "you must always travel with your bags.'' So we had to hang around the Phila airport for an extra couple of hours.

The fly-with-bags rule is apparently to prevent people from putting a bomb in their luggage set to go off on a connecting flight, while they're not also on it.

That might make sense, except that there could be fewer safer bets as an airline passenger than us, a 62-year-old American couple who have flown scores of times over four decades with no incidents. It's not like we had paid cash for a ticket to the U.S. from Nigeria and didn't have any bags or winter coats (which was the case with the would-be bomber who tried to take down a plane near Detroit on Christmas Day.)

I must admit to thinking what a mess our security system is also when, for the second time yesterday, I was patted down by a security agent. (We exited the passenger area briefly in Philadelphia to look for a pair of glasses that Emily lost on the flight down and had to go through security again to get back in. I always get the extra attention from security because the cobalt and titanium in my artificial hips sets off metal detectors.)

At any rate, we got into the Albany airport at midnight and felt the blast of our first Arctic wind in nine days as we waited for the parking-lot shuttle. As one of the passengers on the airliner that skidded to a halt on the runway in Newark yesterday after one wheel on the landing gear failed to deploy said, any landing you walk away from is a good landing.