Can Travelling Get Any Worse?

A few months ago, my youngest and I were stuck on an unmoving Eurostar train for a couple hours. They turned the air and power off. Fortunately, the delay was only a few hours and not nearly day-long imprisonment hundreds of passengers had to suffer recently due to the wrong kind of snow. And now flying is going to get even worse.

A few years ago, one idiot tried to light his shoe on fire and now we all have to kick ours off as part of our pre-flight routine. Now a new idiot smuggled something a bit like semtex in his underpants and tried to ignite it. So can we look forward to being aggressively groped and fondled by security automatons? You betcha!

"They patted you down really well," said Allen, 41, an automotive engineer from Shelby Township, Mich. "It wasn't just a quick rub, it was a slow pat."

Fabulous! I'm looking forward to the slow pat already. But it gets even better. What's the best way to prevent someone from blowing up a plane with a c4 jockstrap? If you said, "don't let anyone put a pillow in their laps", you're qualified to work in airline security. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure that waiting until the end of the flight was not an essential feature of this particular explosion plot. But once you remove the power of critical thought, you get idiotic practices [already adopted!] such as these:

Passengers getting off flights from overseas reported being told that they couldn't get out of their seat for the last hour of their flight. Air Canada also said that during the last hour passengers won't be allowed access to carry-on baggage or to have any items on their laps.
...
Passengers on a United Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Washington were not allowed to have anything on their laps during the descent into Dulles, or to open the overhead bins an hour before landing

Since I haven't yet had my lobotomy, I'm not seeing how these measures will help. If he tried to ignite his pants in the middle of the flight, would there be a ban on getting up or putting a pillow in your lap for the middle hour of the flight? What color were his underpants? Can we ban that color, too? He spent 20 minutes in the loo, can we look forward to flight attendants having to time our toilet breaks?

What preventive measures would be better to put the kibosh on copycats? Given dogs' natural love of crotch-sniffing and some breeds' remarkable ability to be trained to detect explosives, I think the solution is obvious.