According to a piece in yesterday’s Washington Post James Wilding, head of the Washington Airports Authority,

grapples with a powerful but frustrating new tenant at his airports: the Transportation Security Administration. He said he lost patience as months passed and the TSA couldn’t answer any of his questions about how airlines at Dulles and National would be able to screen all luggage by the Dec. 31 deadline set by Congress.

“They’d just say, ‘We don’t have anything to say to you yet,’ ” Wilding said. “They said, ‘We’re going to rely on these contractors to do it,’ and we said, ‘When are they going to show up? Have you all looked at a calendar lately?’ ”

By June, 10 months after the attacks, Wilding still hadn’t had a “substantive conversation” with anyone from the TSA about how they were going to get the massive machines in place in time.

This Post piece ends by quoting a flight attendant who says

There comes a point,” she said, “when you have to settle back into a groove and trust that the government has done things to protect you more.

The problem is that the government hasn’t protected us. They’re merely imposing costs on us. We can’t become complacent, or we’ll become victims again.