In July 2025, the TSA ended the requirement that airline passengers remove their shoes at security checkpoints. The mandate had run for nearly 19 years, from August 2006.
The rule’s most-quoted defense — from former TSA administrator John Pistole — pointed to more than 5.5 billion passengers flying after Richard Reid’s 2001 shoe-bomb attempt without a repeat attack. Critics called that the banana-in-the-ear fallacy: crediting a rule for the absence of an event it may not have prevented. No shoe bomb was ever caught by the mandate.
For nearly two decades, the most universal image of American air travel was not the boarding pass. It was the sight of strangers shuffling through metal detectors in their socks.
The shoe rule is gone. The question it raised has not been answered: how do you judge a security intervention meant to stop something that almost never happens?
The banana-in-the-ear defense, taken seriously
John Pistole’s shoe-rule defense deserves more than mockery. If you wear a banana in your ear and no alligators show up, the banana did not cause their absence. That is the fallacy.
The absence of shoe bombs during the rule’s lifetime does not, by itself, prove the rule stopped anything.
Steelman the argument, though: rare-event security can never be tested like a clinical trial. Nobody can rerun airline history with half the passengers keeping their shoes on. So security agencies lean on the only data they have — the rate of attacks.
The problem is that “no attacks happened” is also the data you would collect if the rule did nothing at all.
That is the unresolved center of the debate. Pistole was making a causal claim — the rule kept passengers safe. The banana analogy exposed the missing counterfactual.
You cannot know whether the absence came from the rule, from the attacker’s incompetence, or from sheer luck.
What 19 years of shoe checks actually caught
The rule was built for a bomb it never met. It did catch weapons.
On September 23, 2020, TSA officers at Philadelphia International Airport found a .25-caliber handgun concealed in a traveler’s shoe. They seized the gun and local police made an arrest. Starting around 2013, TSA releases and news reports describe knives and blades tucked into shoe soles or flip-flops.
Explosives never appeared. Between 2006 and 2025, neither TSA statements nor major news reports record a single thwarted shoe bomb or explosives plot.
The most concrete number available comes from economist Bryan Caplan, who estimates the rule consumed almost 30,000 years of human time. That figure is an analyst computation, not an official government accounting.
Why did the rule take five years to arrive?
Richard Reid attempted to detonate his shoe bomb on December 22, 2001, aboard American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami. TSA did not make shoe removal universal until August 2006. That gap of nearly five years is the quietest puzzle in the rule’s history.
The timing hints at an explanation. British authorities disrupted a transatlantic liquid-bomb plot in August 2006. A 2021 NPR timeline lists those two measures together — shoes off and liquids capped — as simultaneous TSA responses.
But no DHS or TSA primary rulemaking document located in the research explains the five-year delay or identifies a decision memo.
So the causal link between the 2006 liquid plot and shoe removal remains suggestive, not proven. The agency has never published the deliberation that closed the gap.
Why the rest of the world kept its shoes on
Mandatory shoe removal was close to a uniquely American policy. Canada‘s air security authority, CATSA, instructed screeners to “never suggest, ask or demand that passengers remove footwear” before a walk-through metal detector. Canadian passengers generally keep shoes on for domestic and non-U.S. international flights, with removal mostly for U.S.-bound flights or when an alarm sounds.
The United Kingdom’s Department for Transport requires shoe screening only “in certain circumstances,” using approved shoe-explosive and shoe-metal detection systems that screen footwear in place. Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport uses the MagShoe step-on scanner and passenger interviews by default; screeners ask for shoe removal only when a specific traveler raises suspicion.
Ask a screener at Ben Gurion how often shoes come off and you will get a shrug; ask a TSA officer at JFK in 2015 and the answer was every single one.
That difference does not prove the U.S. rule failed. It does show the rest of the advanced aviation world considered alternative screening methods adequate.
TSA’s playbook: plot, rule, retreat
The shoe rule followed a pattern. In August 2006, the liquid-bomb plot led TSA to ban cabin liquids almost entirely, then relax the ban into the 3-1-1 rule: containers of 3.4 ounces (100 milliliters) or less, inside one quart-size bag per passenger.
After an attempted underwear bombing on December 25, 2009, TSA accelerated deployment of advanced imaging technology. The program began in 2007; by 2014, the agency planned 1,800 units as primary screening.
In March 2017, a cabin electronics ban covered devices larger than a smartphone on U.S.-bound flights from 10 airports in eight countries, and it was fully lifted by July 20, 2017.
That pattern — dramatic rules announced after specific plots, some later relaxed — is the context for the shoe mandate’s July 2025 end. It was not the first such retreat, and likely not the last.
How rare was the shoe bomb, really?
Prosecutors said Reid’s device could have opened a hole in the fuselage of American Airlines Flight 63. The threat was real, not a hypothetical the TSA invented after the fact. It was also exceptionally rare.
Later security alerts did mention shoe bombs, but no fully executed in-flight attempt followed Reid’s. Court records from the U.S. and Britain show the original plot was never a one-off impulse. A small cluster of early-2000s conspirators either backed out or were stopped before boarding.
That pattern matters for the Pistole defense. With so few attempts to begin with, “nothing happened while we enforced it” can hardly carry the weight of a causal proof.
The absence was real. What caused it remains the open question.
What this means for your next flight
For most passengers, the end of the shoe mandate means one less thing to juggle at the checkpoint. The July 2025 change removes a 19-year ritual without any documented loss in threat detection, since the rule never caught a bomb.
The larger lesson applies the next time any security measure is defended by “nothing happened while it was in place.” Ask what would have happened without it. That counterfactual rarely has an answer, but asking it keeps the banana logic honest.
Two questions remain open: whether the 2025 decision came from a formal cost-benefit analysis, and whether any precise dollar figure for the rule exists. Public records do not resolve either.
Questions? Answers.
Why is TSA getting rid of shoe removal?
DHS formally ended the shoe-removal requirement on July 8, 2025. The agency did not publish a detailed cost-benefit rationale, and TSA’s broader screening investments — such as advanced imaging technology, which began deploying in 2007 and accelerated after the 2009 attempted bombing — predate the change.
Did the mandatory shoe-removal rule ever catch an actual shoe bomb?
No. Across the rule’s 2006-to-2025 run, public records show no shoe bomb or explosives plot that screeners actually thwarted. The rule did catch weapons — including a .25-caliber handgun in a traveler’s shoe at Philadelphia International Airport on September 23, 2020 — but never the explosive threat it was designed for.
How much time did travelers collectively lose to shoe removal?
Economist Bryan Caplan estimated that the policy consumed almost 30,000 years of collective time over its run. That figure is an analyst computation, not an official government accounting, since no standalone dollar-cost or time-cost study from TSA or GAO exists.
How did other countries screen shoes without requiring removal?
Canada generally lets passengers keep shoes on for domestic and non-U.S. flights, requiring removal mainly for U.S.-bound flights or when metal detectors alarm. The UK’s Department for Transport mandates shoe screening only in specified circumstances, using approved detection systems that screen footwear in place. Israeli security uses step-on scanners and interviews by default, removing shoes only when a specific traveler raises suspicion.
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