The Israeli case
The alleged anti-terror measures in the airports seem to be mainly a huge job-creation scheme for the "security" industries and services and actually reduce the safety of, and of course the comfort of the passengers.
As an example we can take the Israeli Ben-Gurion Airport, which boasts of having one of the tightest "security" operations in the world, allegedly effectively eliminating terrorist hijackings. In fact, Ben-Gurion's safety ranking is nothing to brag about. In November 2008 even the US Federal Aviation Administration downgraded Israel's aviation safety ranking and since then there has been no improvement.