No-Fly ZONE

HEADNOTE

The problem with the federal watch list is that airlines are searching it for numbers, not names.

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Your name

is a number. Chances are, if you've flown on a U.S. commercial airline in the past three years, its employees have compared your name, and those of everyone else on your flight, to a list of at least 20,000 people the government says are a threat to civil aviation, often because they're suspected terrorists. The airlines are looking for a match between their passenger manifests and the government's "no-fly" list, and if they find one, they can bar you from boarding a plane.

As sensitive an operation as this is, many times the airlines base a match not on the spelling of your name, but on a special code that consists of one letter followed by three numbers that describes how your name sounds when it's spoken. Your surname is tagged with one of these codes, and so are other names, possibly hundreds, that are spelled differently but sound something like yours. (Smith and Smyth, for instance, are identically coded.) So, if your code matches one on the no-fly list, even if the name attached to it isn't yours, you may find yourself trying to convince a federal agent that you're not a terrorist.