America couldn't adopt El-Al levels of security.
I say perhaps the airline industry is very set in their ways.
I'm thinking along the lines of a revamped airline industry, with more numerous smaller hubs, more like a web, with smaller entities concerned mainly with providing service from one hub to it's connecting hubs.
Smith's main reasons why America couldn't implement Israeli tactics were the scale and the cost. With smaller independent hubs, more organized through smart computer networking, ticketing could be automated, as well as route calculation, with smaller more targeted flights--all of which would contribute to a more efficient machine, ticket prices might go up slightly, but in exchange for actual security improvements and better , more-direct service, people might not mind. More importantly, each hub as a separate economic unit would find ways of making the economics, as well as the security, work for them.
The goal being, if each hub had about twice the traffic of TLV maximum, there's a good chance real security protocols could be implemented.
Besides the obvious cost in new infrastructure, the two major hurdles would be (imho) 1. People are not evenly distributed across the US, but rather are focused more heavily at the borders (which makes the current 3 or 4 hubs so convenient) 2. People wan't to make the minimum number of connecting flights -- something I think could be made less of a people-issue but takeoff and landing are still the most dangerous part of flying, and takeoff the most fuel consuming.
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