Frank Henderson with a demonstration version of the proposed bowl, assembled from the contents of his own kitchen, at his home in Gahanna, Ohio, on Wednesday. The boarding pass on which the original design was drawn is at left. Credit: Theodore Ansel/The New York Time5
Frank Henderson with a demonstration version of the proposed bowl, assembled from the contents of his own kitchen, at his home in Gahanna, Ohio, on Wednesday. The boarding pass on which the original design was drawn is at left. Credit: Theodore Ansel/The New York Time5

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A 47-year-old regional sales manager from Gahanna, Ohio, has proposed abolishing passenger screening at American airports and replacing it with a stainless-steel bowl of knives at the end of every jetway. He described the plan on Tuesday at Gate B22 of John Glenn Columbus International Airport, while eating a sandwich that had been unwrapped for inspection at the checkpoint that morning. The proposal has not been submitted to the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration or any carrier. According to officials familiar with the matter, it has nonetheless been read.

Frank Henderson, who sells commercial flooring across a four-state territory and flies, by his own count, between thirty and forty times a year, said the plan took shape earlier this month after a screening at this airport during which he was required to remove his shoes, surrender a bottle of shampoo whose legality he maintains and the agency has declined to address, and watch a gloved hand enter his carry-on bag. He characterized the current system not as an inconvenience but as “an active insult to American ingenuity,” and said the alternative had been “right there the whole time.”

“You put a big stainless-steel bowl at the end of every jetway,” Mr. Henderson said. “Full of knives. Decent ones. Not those little plastic things. Real knives. You walk up, you grab one, you get on the plane. When you land, you drop it back in the bowl on the way out. Like a library book, but for stabbing.”

The proposal inverts the prevailing doctrine of aviation security, which since 2001 has sought to keep weapons off aircraft and which Mr. Henderson described as “a bunch of people in blue shirts yelling at grandmothers about yogurt.” Under his model the aircraft would be secured instead by the universal armament of its passengers. “In the event of something, now you’ve got 180 people with knives instead of zero,” he said. “Math works out.” The figure approximates the capacity of a Boeing 737-800. Mr. Henderson did not say whether he had chosen it for that reason, and a person who has reviewed his sketch said the question had not come up.

The sketch, drawn on the back of a boarding pass, depicts a vessel roughly the size of a large salad bowl, mounted at waist height beside the aircraft door. Mr. Henderson describes the system as “self-policing.” Passengers who fail to return a knife on deplaning would be assessed a “lost utensil fee” on their next ticket, a mechanism he compared to hotel policy on hangers. He does not anticipate significant losses. “Who’s gonna steal a knife at an airport? That’s how you get put on a list,” he said. “Plus, if somebody steals one, that just means the next guy grabs two. Still fine.” The list to which Mr. Henderson referred exists. According to two officials, there are several.

Asked whether the presence of some 180 knives in a pressurized cabin might generate new categories of incident — disputes over armrests, for instance, or over the contents of overhead bins — Mr. Henderson said that such disputes already occur and that his system would merely resolve them. “People already get in fights over that stuff. At least now the fight has a clear winner,” he said. “And if some guy starts yelling about his seat, everybody else is holding a knife too. It kind of regulates itself.”

Dr. Philip Marchetti, the director of the Center for Aviation Threat Posture Studies in Arlington, Va., and a former chief risk officer of the T.S.A., said the proposal should be understood as a shift from a detection model to a deterrence model. “That is not, in itself, a disqualifying feature,” Dr. Marchetti said. “It is the model we use for nuclear weapons.” He noted, however, that deterrence theory presumes rational actors with symmetrical information and something to lose, “and a cabin at thirty-six thousand feet is not a population in which that assumption has historically held, particularly after the beverage service.” The bowl, he said, would in effect relocate the checkpoint from the entrance of the aircraft to its exit, “and convert it from a screening operation into an inventory count.” He added that he had seen the sketch. He declined to say how.

Carl Brandvold, a spokesman for the T.S.A., said in a statement that the agency “has not received a proposal from Mr. Henderson and does not comment on proposals it has not received.” The F.A.A. referred questions to the T.S.A. The intelligence community has not assessed the proposal, according to an official who would be in a position to know whether it had. A spokesman for Senator Gerald Frisch, Republican of Ohio, who sits on the Armed Services Committee and was born in Columbus, said the senator “does not regard the reverse side of a boarding pass as an instrument of federal rulemaking” but would review any proposal “submitted through the appropriate channels, which exist.” A Senate aide who works on homeland security matters, and who was not authorized to discuss the proposal because it does not formally exist, said committee staff had been made aware of it on Wednesday morning, “in the sense that we have all now read it.”

Mr. Henderson said he had not approached any of these parties and preferred, for now, to “let the idea marinate.” He is focused, he said, on secondary design questions: whether the knives should be serrated, and whether passengers in first class should select from “a smaller, more attractive bowl.” “Look, I’m not saying it’s perfect,” he said, folding the sketch and returning it to the pocket of his jacket. “I’m just saying it’s better than whatever the hell we’re doing now.”

Whatever is being done now has been measured, though the measurements are not public. In 2015, covert testers working for the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security carried mock weapons and explosives through checkpoints at airports across the country in 67 of 70 attempts, a result that was classified and that became public within days anyway. The agency has said its performance has improved since. The figures that would demonstrate this are classified as well. Dr. Marchetti, asked what distinguished the two systems, said that under the current one the number of knives aboard a given aircraft is unknown, “and under Mr. Henderson’s it would be known. I don’t say that as a recommendation. It’s just the first time we’d have a count.”

Mr. Henderson was selected for a gate screening before boarding and was informed that his sandwich required additional inspection. He spent the next eleven minutes, according to two passengers who observed the exchange, explaining to a transportation security officer that the mayonnaise on it was “obviously not a liquid.” The agency’s published guidance treats mayonnaise as a liquid, gel or aerosol when it is carried in a container. Its position on mayonnaise already applied to bread is, according to an official who has consulted it, “contextual.” Mr. Henderson was permitted to board. The sandwich was not.

The T.S.A. has had a copy of the sketch since Tuesday morning, according to two officials familiar with the matter. Mr. Henderson did not provide it. The boarding pass on which it was drawn was removed from the pocket of his jacket at the direction of an officer at the Concourse B checkpoint, placed in a bin, face up, and passed through the X-ray with the jacket. “The bins are imaged,” one of the officials said. “Everything is.” Asked whether the agency had assessed the proposal, the official said the agency assesses everything it images, and that the assessment was ongoing.