In case any of us had forgotten the lessons of Sept. 11, 2001, recent events such as the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Eve and a serious security breach at a security breach at the Newark Liberty International Airport remind us that missing our connecting flights or losing our luggage isn’t the worst thing that can happen to us on an airplane these days.

Luckily, quick-thinking passengers and flight personnel saved the day on Christmas Eve, and the Newark breach didn’t result in any serious incident, but the events have many politicians and intelligence officials debating how a man could slip by a checkpoint unnoticed and how the suspect, who had known ties to jihadists in Yemen, was able to board a flight at all, let alone how he was able to sneak an explosive device onboard undetected.

We agree with President Obama, who said the intelligence system failed “to connect the dots” regarding the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

We also agree with the president that such lapses, especially when the lives of millions of people are at stake, are unacceptable.

During the height of the Cold War, intelligence agencies almost seemed to take pride in not sharing information with their counterparts, with officials in the intelligence field acting very territorial about such information. We hope that those days are over.

The president seems to think they are, saying that the failure to scope out the suspect’s plans wasn’t from a failure to collect information from intelligence sources, but rather a failure to correctly analyze the information on Abdulmutallab.

We, like many others, wonder if the steps put in place by the Transportation Security Agency after the terrorists attacks on Sept. 11, do any good, or are just stopgap measures designed to make us think that we’re safe when we fly.

Some are calling for the use of much more powerful X-ray technology in our nation’s airlines. These machines would give security officials a much stronger image of what, if anything, passengers are carrying before they board flights, by allowing officials to see under passengers’ clothing.

The use of such high-powered scanners raise serious issues about personal privacy and we must weigh such privacy concerns against security. Some even speculate that the use of such imaging technology on children could violate child pornography laws.

Proponents of the devices say that the images, once viewed by airline security personnel, would be purged from the system, eliminating questions about just who sees the images afterwards, but to us, that just raises another question: Wouldn’t such images, if they detected someone attempting to carry a weapon or explosive device onto an airplane, be a vital part of any prosecution of terrorist suspects? Deleting the image would remove a vital piece of evidence from any prosecutor’s arsenal.

We wonder explosive sensing technology, such as the powerful devices used at nuclear power plants, will ever find a home in our airports.

Installing such sensitive technology will come with an enormous cost, but what price can you put on safety?

Any holes in our intelligence community need to be fixed.

We’re all flying uneasily in these turbulent times.