Success Quote by David Neeleman

Neeleman’s line reads like a harmless travel tip, but its real power is how smoothly it turns a coercive system into common sense. “Of course” does the heavy lifting: it pre-emptively frames compliance as basic adulthood, not a response to an apparatus that has trained us to expect scrutiny. The sentence doesn’t argue for airport security; it assumes it, then slides straight into self-policing. You don’t need to be told what the rules are. You just need to feel slightly foolish if you haven’t internalized them.

The phrasing is corporate in the most strategic way: passive voice and vague categories (“anything that might be considered dangerous”) keep accountability floating. Considered by whom? Under what standard? That ambiguity is the point. It reflects a post-9/11 travel culture where the traveler’s job isn’t merely to be safe, but to be legible to the system - to avoid objects, jokes, even aesthetics that could trigger suspicion. The punishment is small on paper (confiscation), but the implied threat is delay, escalation, embarrassment, the sudden conversion of your day into a problem.

Coming from an airline entrepreneur, the subtext is also operational. Security theater and real security alike are throughput problems: bottlenecks that frustrate customers and disrupt schedules. So the “awareness” being promoted isn’t civic vigilance; it’s friction reduction. It’s a polite reminder that in modern air travel, convenience is conditional, and the price of moving quickly is anticipating the state’s anxiety before it has to.