I flew El Al from London to Tel Aviv about 10 years a go, happen to be the same week that the US embassy there was closed for the very first time due to some unspecified security threat.
I was impressed with the airline security, extremely thorough. However, applying a similar system would grind US travel to an absolute crawl. I don’t have the stats but US airline system must be 1000x larger.
Similiar experiences to above, tag team separate interviews with my colleague, looking for suspicious activities. They looked through every piece of luggage by hand very thoroughly, spent a good 15min on mine.
Must have been 4 to 6 British securiy around the gate area all armed with automatic weapons.
As we pulled out of the gate I looked out the window, there right next to us was an APC armored personnel carrier, escorting us to the runway!
I felt very safe and would probably only fly El Al to Israel again. They know what they are doing.
