[ed. It seems like we've been commemorating 9/11 every day for a decade, and what a legacy it has produced: a burdensome TSA bureaucracy (read below), two wars, hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths; normalization of torture; widespread unlawful surveillance; an assault on the 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments; Homeland inSecurity; Guantanamo; Black Sites; a hemorrhaging economy, staggering war-profiteering; an annual Pentagon budget exceeding $680 billion, the list goes on and on. On a more fundamental level we've institutionalized and normalized fear and anxiety of terrorists, of Muslims and Arabs, of illegal immigrants, of porous borders, of color-coded threat charts, of nail clippers and shampoo bottles; and polarized the country's politics and citizenry into raging incoherence. I can hardly wait for the next decade.]
by Patrick Smith
In America and across much of the world, the security enhancements put in place following the September 11th catastrophe have been drastic and of two kinds: those practical and effective, and those irrational and pointless. The first variety have taken place almost entirely behind the scenes. Explosives scanning for checked luggage, for instance, was long overdue and is perhaps the most welcome addition. It’s the second variety, unfortunately, that have come to dominate the air travel experience, wasting our time and money and humiliating millions of flyers on a daily basis. Nearly ten years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, airport security remains a theater of the absurd.
There are two fundamental flaws in our approach:
The first is a strategy that looks upon everybody who flies — the old and young, fit and infirm, domestic and foreign, pilot and passenger — as a potential terrorist. That is to say, we’re searching for weapons rather than specific people who might actually use them. This is an impossible, unsustainable task in a nation where some two million people travel by air each day. I’ll remind you that tough-as-nails prison guards cannot keep knives out of maximum security cell blocks, never mind the idea of TSA guards trying to root out every conceivable weapon at an overcrowded airport.
The second and related fundamental flaw is our foolish, lingering preoccupation with the tactics used by the terrorists on September 11th. To better understand, we need to revisit that Tuesday morning, and grasp exactly what it was that the 19 hijackers so easily took advantage of. Conventional wisdom says the terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling aboard boxcutters. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What they actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings. In years past, a takeover meant hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were trained in the concept of “passive resistance.” What weapons the 19 men possessed mattered little; had boxcutters been on the contraband list, the men would have smuggled something else or fashioned their weapons from items on board. It didn’t matter. The success of their plan relied not on weaponry but on the element of surprise. And in this respect, their scheme was all but guaranteed not to fail.
For a number of reasons, most notably the awareness of passengers and crew, just the opposite is now true. Before the first of the Twin Towers had fallen to the ground, that element of surprise, and the boxcutters that went with it, were no longer a useful tool. Paradigm over. Hijackers today would face a planeload of frightened people ready to fight back, and thus an unaffordable probability of failure. The September 11th scheme is kaput.
In spite of this reality, we are apparently content spending billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened and cannot happen again — guards pawing through our luggage in a hunt for what are effectively harmless items: hobby knives, scissors and screwdrivers. Not to mention, even a child knows that a deadly weapon can be fashioned from virtually anything, from a ballpoint pen to a broken first class dinner plate.
The folly is much the same with respect to the restrictions on liquids and gels, put in place following the break-up of a London-based cabal that was planning to blow up jetliners using liquid explosives. Allegations surrounding the conspiracy were revealed to substantially embellished. In an August, 2006 article in the New York Times, British officials admitted that public statements made following the arrests were overcooked, inaccurate, and “unfortunate.”
Among first to express serious skepticism about the bombers’ readiness was Thomas C. Greene, whose essay in The Register explored the extreme difficulty of mixing and deploying the types of binary explosives purportedly to be used. Green had conferred with Professor Jimmie C. Oxley, an explosives specialist who has closely studied the type of deadly cocktail coveted by the London plotters.
“The notion that deadly explosives can be cooked up in an airplane lavatory is pure fiction,” Greene said during an interview. “A handy gimmick for action movies and shows like ’24.’ The reality proves disappointing: it’s rather awkward to do chemistry in an airplane toilet. Nevertheless, our official protectors and deciders respond to such notions instinctively, because they’re familiar to us: we’ve all seen scenarios on television and in the cinema. This, incredibly, is why you can no longer carry a bottle of water onto a plane.”
The threat of liquid explosives does exist, but they cannot be readily brewed from the kinds of liquids we have devoted most of our resources to keeping from planes. “I would not hesitate to allow that liquid explosives can pose a danger,” Greene added, recalling Ramzi Yousef’s detonation of a small nitroglycerine bomb aboard Philippine Airlines Flight 434 in 1994. The explosion was a test run for the so-called “Project Bojinka,” the long-forgotten Al-Qaeda scheme to simultaneously destroy a dozen widebody airliners over the Pacific Ocean. “But the idea that confiscating someone’s toothpaste is going to keep us safe is too ridiculous to entertain.”
But of all the contradictions and self-defeating measures TSA has come up with, none could be more ludicrous than the policy decreeing that pilots and flight attendants undergo the same x-ray and metal detector screening as passengers. What makes it ludicrous is that tens of thousands of other airport workers, from baggage loaders and fuelers to cabin cleaners and maintenance personnel, are subject only to occasional random screenings when they come to work. These are individuals with full access to aircraft, inside and out. Some are airline employees, though a high percentage are contract staff belonging to outside companies. An airline pilot who once flew bombers armed with nuclear weapons, and who has undergone rigorous background checks prior to employment, is not to be trusted, and is marched through the metal detectors before every flight. But those who cater the galleys, sling the suitcases and sweep out the aisles, amble through a turnstile unmolested.
That’s not to imply that caterers, baggage handlers, cabin cleaners, and the rest of the exempted ground workers are dangerous. Nevertheless, this is a double standard so staggeringly audacious that it can hardly be believed. TSA actually looks us in the eye and tells us that pilots “need” be screened — as it waives screening for tarmac workers. If there is a more ringing let-me-get-this-straight scenario anywhere in the realm of airport security, I’d like to hear it. On the one hand we give our enemies all the credit in the world — requiring toddlers to take their shoes off, for instance — yet we hardly hesitate in offering up loopholes big enough to steer a 767 through.
Here’s a true story:
I’ve just worked a flight coming from overseas. I’m wearing my full uniform, and have all of my gear with me. The plan is to run upstairs and leave my flight bag in the crew room before catching my commuter flight home. Unfortunately this means having to endure arrival screening, one of airport security’s most irritating protocols. After clearing customs, passengers and crew alike face the x-ray line and metal detector before they’re allowed back into the concourse. (This inconvenient rule is in place because of another inconvenient rule — the one that makes connecting passengers claim and re-check their luggage when arriving from places outside the United States — even though their bags have already been screened at the point of departure. The thinking is that people could unpack this or that dangerous item from a checked suitcase — a four-ounce bottle of shampoo say — then carry it to the next flight.)
So, together with a throng of exhausted passengers I’m funneled into the grimy, dimly lit checkpoint. I hoist my crew bags onto the x-ray belt, then pass through the metal detector. Once on the other side, I’m waiting for my stuff to reappear when suddenly the belt comes to a stop. “Bag check!” shouts the guard behind the monitor.
The bag she’s talking about turns out to be my roll-aboard. A second guard, a mean-looking woman whose girth is exceeded only by the weight of the chip on her shoulder, comes over and yanks it from the machine.
“Is this yours?” she wants to know.
“Yes, it’s mine.”
“You got a knife in here?”
“A knife?”
“A knife,” she barks. Some silverware?”
Yes I do. I always do. Inside my roll-aboard I carry a spare set of airline-issue cutlery – a spoon, a fork, and a knife. Along with packets of noodles and other small snacks, this is part of my hotel survival kit, useful in the event of short layovers when food isn’t available. Borrowed from my collection of airline silverware (some of us really have such things), it’s the exact cutlery that accompanies your meal on a long-haul flight. The pieces are stainless steel, and about five inches long. The knife has a rounded end and a short row of teeth — I would call them serrations, but that’s too strong a word. For all intents and purposes, it’s a miniature butter knife.
“Yes,” I tell the guard. “There’s a metal knife in there – a butterknife.”
She opens the compartment and takes out a small vinyl case containing the three pieces. After removing the knife, she holds it upward between with two fingers and stares at me coldly. Her pose is like that of an angry schoolteacher about to berate a child for bringing some forbidden object to class.
“You ain’t takin’ this through,” she says. “No knifes [sic]. You can’t bring a knife through here.”
It takes a moment for me to realize that she’s serious. “I’m… but…. it’s…”
“Sorry.” She throws it into a bin and starts to walk away.
“Wait a minute,” I say. “That’s airline silverware.”
“Don’t matter what it is. You can’t bring knifes through here.”
“Ma’am, that’s an airline knife. It’s the knife they give you on the plane.”
“No knifes. Have a good afternoon, sir.”
“You can’t be serious,” I say.
With that she grabs the knife out of the bin and walks over to one of her colleagues, seated at the end of the checkpoint in a folding chair. I follow her over.
“This guy wants to bring this through.”
The man in the chair looks up lazily. “Is it serrated?”
She hands it to him. He looks at it quickly, then addresses me.
“No, this is no good. You can’t take this.”
“Why not?”
“It’s serrated.” He is talking about the little row of teeth along the edge. Truth be told, the knife in question, which I’ve had for years, is actually smaller and less sharp than the knives currently handed out by my airline to its first and business class customers. You’d be hard pressed to cut a slice of toast with it.
“Oh come on.”
“What do you call these?” He runs his finger along the miniscule serrations.
“Those… but… they… it…”
“No serrated knives. You can’t take this.”
“But sir, how can it not be allowed when it’s the same knife they give you on the plane!”
“Those are the rules.”
“That’s impossible. Can I please speak to a supervisor?”
“I am the supervisor.”
There are those moments in life when time stands still and the air around you seems to solidify. You stand there in an amber of absurdity, waiting for the crowd to burst out laughing and the “Candid Camera” guy to appear from around the corner.
Except the supervisor is dead serious.
Realizing that I’m not getting my knife back, I try for the consolation prize, which is getting the man to admit that, if nothing else, the rule makes no sense. “Come on,” I argue. “The purpose of confiscating knives is to keep people from bringing them onto planes, right? But the people planes are legally handed these knives with their meals. Plus, I’m the pilot! How can you… I mean… it’s just… At least admit to me that it’s a dumb rule.”
“It’s not a dumb rule.”
“Yes it is.”
“Not it isn’t.”
And so on, until he asks me to leave.
What happened to me was wrong on so many levels that it’s hard to keep them straight. Just for starters, do I really need to point out that an airline pilot at the controls of his plane would hardly need a butter knife is he desired to inflict damage?
Now a liquids story:
One day in 2006 my mother caused a small commotion at a checkpoint at Boston-Logan after screeners discovered a container of homemade tomato sauce in her bag. What with the preponderance of spaghetti grenades and lasagna bombs, we can all be proud of their vigilance; and, as a liquid, tomato sauce is in clear violation of the TSA’s carry-on statutes. But this time there was a wrinkle: the sauce was frozen.
The icy red block had the guards in a scramble. Liquid, solid, gel, what was it? A supervisor was called over to assess things. He spent several moments stroking his chin. Drawing from an exquisite knowledge of refrigeration, he observantly sized things up. “It’s not a liquid right now,” he noted. “But it will be soon.”
“I wonder if this isn’t a test,” murmured another guard.
“Please,” urged my mother. “Please don’t take away my dinner.”
Lo and behold, they did not. Whether out of confusion, sympathy, or embarrassment, she was allowed to pass with her murderous marinara.
This got me thinking. The proper course of action, need it be said, would be for TSA to overhaul its entire approach. For several reasons — not the least of which is the traveling public’s apparent eagerness to be subjugated, harassed, and humiliated — this is not going to happen, but is it too much to ask, in consolation, for the agency to exhibit a little common sense now and then, sanctioning some flexibility in its protocols? If we’re to believe that TSA screeners are highly trained professionals, as the agency maintains, can they not handle the responsibility of an occasional judgment call, some on-the-spot decision-making?
“Our screeners are allowed to exercise leeway in some cases,” a TSA spokesperson told me. “They have the training, and the obligation, to exercise discretion.” Maybe, but the tomato sauce incident notwithstanding, I’m not seeing much leeway and discretion. I’m seeing blind adherence to rules. I’m seeing a draconian obsession with the exactness of container volumes and the dimensions of harmless objects, up to and including whether or not a crewmember’s tiny knife has serrations on its blade, as if they alone could be the difference between unsafe and safe. Enforcement of this kind transcends mere tedium and becomes downright dangerous. Maybe you’ve heard the story about a test in which TSA screeners are presented with a suitcase containing a mock explosive device with a water bottle nestled next to it. They ferret out the water, of course, while the bomb goes sailing through.
Photo by author
Notice too the uniforms worn by TSA. Screeners are now called “officers” and they wear blue shirts and silver badges. Not by accident, the shirts and badges look exactly like the kind worn by police. Mission-creep, this is called. In fact TSA workers do not have law enforcement power — much as the agency has done a good job at fooling people into believing otherwise. TSA holds the authority — legitimately enough in my opinion — to inspect your belongings and prevent you from passing through a checkpoint. However, it does not have the authority to interrogate you, force you to recite the national anthem, or otherwise compromise your rights. Both TSA and the traveling public need to remember this.
“It’ll go a long way to enhance the respect of this workforce,” voiced one TSA “officer” after the new uniforms were unveiled in 2008. No, sorry, that’s not it. You don’t bully and fool people into respecting you.
In early 2010, things were taken to the next level with the introduction of full-body scanners at European and U.S. airports. This is the latest and one of the more disheartening developments in our long war on the abstract noun called terrorism. What’s next, we have to ask, in this unwinnable arms race / shell game? Where will it end? Or is this the end?
We’re asked to believe the scanners are a critical tool. Yet they are being deployed domestically rather than at airports overseas, and only sporadically at that. Should a bomber notice a scanner at one checkpoint, he merely needs to choose the next one down. And here’s where it’s easy to be cynical. Instead of body scanners, why not rely on bomb-sniffing dogs? They’re at least as effective, unobtrusive, and much cheaper (and cuter besides). I suspect it’s because there isn’t a big corporation somewhere that stands to earn billions from the deployment of dogs. It’s doubtful the scanners are making us safer. But rest assured they’re making somebody wealthy.
Apparently this is acceptable. If, a decade ago, we were told that people would soon have to appear naked in order to board an airplane, the claim would have been met by peals of laughter, if not howls of outrage. But here it has come to pass, and our reaction, aside from one or two muffled complaints, has been a sheep-like acquiescence.
“If it means we’re safer….” We hear that a lot. Except, ignoring for a minute the perils of swapping away rights for security, people don’t mean it. After all, you’re far more likely to be killed in a highway crash than be blown up on an airliner, so why aren’t we out there spending billions and stripping away liberties in the name of highway safety? We still hear righteous cries of fascism any time the cops set up DWI roadblocks — heaven forbid “the man” make me blow into a tube — but sure, I’ll doff my boxers if it protects me from “terror.”
No less frustrating is the strained notion that, beginning with the events of September 11th, air travel suddenly entered a brand new age of unprecedented danger and threat. We’re asked to accept some “new reality” of air travel, when really the risks aren’t much different than they were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. The attacks of 2001 stand as terrorism’s defining spectacle, and the ongoing threat of future attacks cannot be denied.
However, acts of political violence against civil aviation are hardly a recent phenomenon. In fact we see far fewer of them than we used to. By comprison, once can remember the 1970s and 1980s as sort of Golden Age of Air Crimes, rich with hijackings and bombings. Over one five-year span between 1985 and 1989 we can count at least six high-profile terrorist attacks against commercial planes or airports. These include the horrific bombings of Pan Am 103 and UTA 772, the bombing of an Air India 747 over the North Atlantic that killed 329 people, and the saga of TWA flight 847.
Flight 847, headed from Athens to Rome, was hijacked by Shiite militiamen armed with grenades and pistols. The purloined 727 then embarked on a remarkable, 17-day odyssey to Lebanon, Algeria, and back again. At one point passengers are removed, split into groups and held captive in downtown Beirut. The photograph of TWA captain John Testrake, his head out the cockpit window, collared by a gun-wielding terrorist, was broadcast worldwide and became an unforgettable icon of the siege.
I say “unforgettable” but that’s just the thing. How many Americans remember flight 847? We act as if the clock didn’t began ticking until September 11th, 2001. In truth we’ve been dealing with this stuff for decades. It’s astonishing how short our memories are. And partly because they’re so short, we are easily frightened and manipulated.
Imagine TWA 847 happening tomorrow. Imagine six successful terror attacks against commercial aviation in a five-year span. The airline industry would be paralyzed, the populace frozen in abject fear. It would be a catastrophe of epic proportion — of wall-to-wall coverage and, dare I suggest, the summary surrender of important civil liberties. What is it about us, as a nation, that has made us so unable to remember, and unable to cope?
So, enough of what we shouldn’t be doing. What about things we should be doing? If I’m going to spend all this time complaining, it’s only fair that I offer up some solutions, no?
Security overall ought to be scaled back, into a leaner but more focused operation. First up, every dime currently being spent looking for pointy objects, double-checking people’s IDs and confiscating innocuous liquids needs to be reallocated. I wouldn’t say that we have too much security, necessarily, but we certainly have too much in the wrong places, out of synch with the hierarchy of threat.
The primary threat to commercial planes is, was, and shall remain, bombs. Thus every piece of luggage, both checked and carry-on, ought to be carefully scrutinized for explosives. They already are, actually, though I reckon we could be doing a more thorough job of it. With an emphasis on airports outside the United States. The likeliest point of entry for a bomb is not Omaha or Tucson. I’d suggest reallocate at least 30 percent of resources to airports overseas.
Scrutinizing passengers themselves is a little trickier. Body-scanners, for all their controversy, are an admittedly effective tool, but another idea is the more widespread use those explosives-sniffing “puffer” machines now in sporadic deployment. It’d be expensive and technologically challenging, yes, but made more affordable by eliminating much of what’s currently in place. Meanwhile, an x-ray and magnometer check for guns and large knives is perfectly reasonable.
And perhaps it’s time to put greater emphasis on passenger profiling. Profiling is a dirty word to some, but it needn’t be a one-dimensional preoccupation with skin color or national origin. Indeed, as any security specialist will tell you, racial profiling doesn’t work. Routine is weakness, and the more predictable our methods are, the easier they are to defeat. Effective profiling uses a multi-point approach that takes in a wide range of characteristics, both tangible and behavioral. TSA has in fact been training staff in the finer points of behavioral pattern recognition. That’s good, thought for the time being screeners are a lot more adept at picking out scissors and shampoo bottles than picking out terrorists.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has proposed a plan in which passengers will be categorized into one of three risk groups, and then screened accordingly. Biometric proof-of-identity, such as a fingerprint or encoded passport, will be checked against a stored profile containing various personal data, and also against watch lists. This, together with flight booking data will determine which of three lines a traveler is then assigned to. Those in the first line would receive little more than a cursory bag check, while those in the third line would be subject to an enhanced inspection similar to the TSA procedures that are currently applied to everybody. This wouldn’t be perfect — and like many people, I get a little nervous when I hear the words “biometric” and “profile containing various personal data” — but it’s maybe the best idea yet when it comes to restoring sanity to airport security.
IATA says that an early version of the three-tiered system could be up and running in under three years. That is, if governments cooperate. Most, I feel, will be willing to give it a try. The European Union, for example, has expressed an eagerness to phase out the silly restrictions on liquids.
It’s not the Europeans that make me nervous, it’s the Americans. IATA is making sense, but I’m sad to say it lacks the clout — and the inertia — of the US Department of Homeland Security. Enacting these changes would take, more than anything else, the political courage of our President and Congress. We have thus far seen almost no political opposition, bipartisan or otherwise, to TSA’s ponderous and intrusive methods. While I hate to sounds like a conspiracy theorist, our leaders talk and act as if they enjoy the status quo, unwilling to disenfranchise any facet of what has become a vast and profitable security industry.
Then we’ve got TSA itself. No doubt it sees the IATA proposal as a threat, and is likely to fight it tooth and nail. The agency is now firmly, perhaps irrevocably entrenched, and has grown giddy with power — the power that our leaders have granted it, aided and abetted by a lethargic populace and an irresponsible media. No idea, however useful, will withstand the opposition of a government entity that effectively answers to nobody.
And the next terrorist attack, or even a close call, is liable to wipe out any enthusiasm IATA is able to drum up, and re-set the clock.
It doesn’t need to be this way. The solution is out there. Give us good intelligence-gathering and law enforcement, together with on-site random searches, thorough explosives scanning, and smartly managed profiling, and what have we got? A security strategy that is frankly pretty good. As good as it can be, anyway.
But then, how far do we go? How far should we go? I haven’t even touched on the deadly dangers of shoulder-launched missiles and other military-grade weapons available around the globe. You could hunker down unseen in any of a thousand neighborhoods abutting a major airport, armed with a portable launcher or a gun loaded with pyrophoric shells. Hell, inducing panic needn’t involve an airplane at all. An explosion in a crowded terminal would have basically the same impact as a downing a plane (the concept is not new; airport terminals have been attacked in years past.) How do we meet a threat that is able to take on so many forms and employ so many deadly tactics? Do we x-ray every cabin cleaner’s lunchpail, every gate agent’s knapsack? Do we bulletproof every plane and spend billions putting anti-missile devices into their bellies? Do we turn our airports into armed fortresses?
To some extent, this is the path we have chosen. Yet somewhere beneath all of this rests the uncomfortable, seldom acknowledged fact that no matter how hard we try, we’re never going to make our airports and airplanes completely safe. Neither all the determination in the world nor the most sweeping regulations we dare codify, will outsmart a cunning enough saboteur. Sound, competent security greatly improves our chances, whether against the concoctions of a single deranged individual or organized terror from the caves of Central Asia. But with the advent of every new technology or pledge of better safeguards, we correspondingly inspire the imaginations of those who wish to defeat us. There will always be a way to skirt the system. Coming to terms with this isn’t easy — and neither is it the same as rolling over. We can and should improve our odds. Doing so, however, requires us to be the one thing we thus far haven’t been: reasonable.
We also need to acknowledge that the real job of keeping terrorists and criminals away from planes is not the job of airport screeners in the first place. Rather, it’s the job of government agencies and law enforcement. It’s not very glamorous, but the grunt work of hunting down terrorists takes place far off stage, relying on the diligent work of cops, spies, and intelligence officers. Air crimes need to be stopped at the planning stages. By the time a terrorist gets to the airport, chances are it’s too late. And defusing the rage of angry radicals is a long-term anthropological mission for our leaders, not an excuse to barricade public spaces or subvert freedoms. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of Semtex, and there’s little to gain by bogging down resources in what amounts to a feel-good fantasy.
In the end, I’m not sure which is more troubling, the inanity of the existing regulations or the average American’s acceptance of them. These ineffective protocols have solidified into what appears to be indefinite policy, part and parcel of a greater security-industrial complex, with little or no opposition. There ought to be a tide of opposition rising up against this mania. Where is it? At its loudest, the voice of the traveling public is one of grumbly resignation. The op-ed pages are silent, the pundits have nothing meaningful to say.
The airlines, for their part, are in something of a bind. The willingness of our carriers to allow flying to become an increasingly unpleasant experience suggests a business sense of masochistic capitulation. On the other hand, imagine the outrage among security zealots should airlines be caught lobbying for what is perceived to be a dangerous abrogation of security and responsibility — even if it’s not. Carriers caught plenty of flack, almost all of it unfair, in the aftermath of September 11th. Understandably, they no longer want that liability.
How we got to this point is an interesting study in reactionary politics, fear mongering, and a disconcerting willingness of the American public to accept almost anything, no matter how illogical, inconvenient or unreasonable, in the name of security. Conned and frightened, our country demands not actual security, but security spectacle. And although a reasonable percentage of passengers, along with most security experts, would concur such theater serves no useful purpose, there has been surprisingly little protest. In that regard, maybe we’ve gotten exactly the system we deserve.
PERSPECTIVE: THE GOLDEN AGE OF AIR CRIMES….
1970: A Pan Am 747 bound for New York is skyjacked after takeoff from Amsterdam. The flight is diverted to Cairo where all of the 170 occupants are released. Radicals then blow up the plane.
1970: In the so-called “Black September” hijackings, five jets, including ones belonging to TWA, Pan Am, and Israel’s El Al, are commandeered over Europe over a three-day span by a group called the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Three of the five planes are diverted to a remote airstrip in Jordan, rigged with explosives and blown up. A fourth is flown to Egypt and destroyed there. All passengers had been freed before the aircraft were demolished.
1971: A man using the name DB Cooper skyjacks and threatens to blow up a Northwest Orient (Northwest Airlines nowadays) 727. He parachutes out the back of the plane with a hefty ransom and is never seen again, dead or alive.
1972: A JAT (Yugoslav Airlines) DC-9 en route from Copenhagen to Zagreb explodes at 33,000 feet. The Ustashe, a.k.a. Croatian National Movement, admits to the bombing.
1972: Explosion aboard a Cathay Pacific jet flying from Bangkok to Hong Kong kills 81 people. A Thai police lieutenant is accused of hiding the bomb in order to murder his fiancée.
1972: In the arrivals lounge of the Lod airport near Tel Aviv, three men from the Japanese Red Army, recruited by the Palestinian PLFP, open fire with machine guns and grenades, killing 26 people and injuring 80.
1973: As passengers board a Pan Am 747 at the airport in Rome, terrorists spray the plane with gunfire and toss grenades into the cabin, killing 30.
1973: Eighty-one perish as an Aeroflot jet explodes over Siberia during an attempted skyjacking.
1974: A TWA 707 flying from Athens to Rome (part of Tel Aviv-New York service), falls into the sea near Greece, the result of an explosive device hidden in the aft cargo compartment.
1974: A man detonates two grenades aboard an Air Vietnam 727 when the crew refuses to fly him to Hanoi.
1976: A Cubana DC-8 crashes near Barbados killing 73. An anti-Castro exile and three alleged accomplices are put on trial but acquitted for lack of evidence.
1977: Both pilots of a Malaysian Airline System (today called Malaysia Airlines) 737 are shot by a skyjacker. The plane crashes into a swamp.
1985: the Abu Nidal group kills 20 people in a pair of coordinated ticket-counter assaults at airports in Vienna and Rome.
1985: Shiite militiamen armed with grenades and pistols overtake TWA Flight 847 traveling (again) from Athens to Rome. The purloined 727 then embarks on a remarkable, 17-day odyssey to Lebanon, Algeria, and back again. At one point passengers are removed, split into groups, and held captive in downtown Beirut. The sole casualty is a U.S. Navy diver who is shot in the temple and dumped on the tarmac. All remaining hostages are eventually released, but not before the Israeli government agrees to free more than 700 Shiite fighters captured in southern Lebanon. The photograph of TWA captain John Testrake, his head out the cockpit window, collared by a gun-wielding terrorist, was broadcast worldwide and became an unforgettable icon of the siege.
1985: An Air India 747 on a service between Toronto and Bombay is bombed over the North Atlantic by Sikh extremists. The 329 fatalities remain history’s worst single-plane act of terrorism. A second bomb, intended for another Air India 747, detonates prematurely in Tokyo before being loaded.
1986: As TWA flight 840 descends through 10,000 feet toward Athens, a bomb goes off in the cabin. Four people are ejected through a tear in the 727′s fuselage.
1986: At Karachi international airport, a Pan Am 747 is preparing for departure when four heavily armed members of the Abu Nidal group seize the aircraft. When Pakistani forces storm the plane, the terrorists begin shooting and lobbing grenades. Twenty-two passengers are killed, and 150 are wounded. Although all four terrorists were captured and sent to prison in Pakistan, they were released in 2001.
1987: A Korean Air Lines 707 disappears over the Andaman Sea en route from Baghdad to Seoul. One of two Koreans suspected of hiding a bomb commits suicide before he’s arrested. His accomplice, a young woman, confesses to leaving the device — fashioned from both plastic and liquid explosives — in an overhead rack before disembarking during an intermediate stop. Condemned to death, the woman is pardoned in 1990 by the president of South Korea.
1987: At LAX, a recently fired employee, David Burke, sneaks a loaded gun past security and boards a Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) jet on its way to San Francisco. During cruise he breaks into the cockpit, shoots both pilots, then noses the airplane into the ground near Harmony, California, killing all 44 on board. he gains access to the cockpit and shoots both pilots and himself, the latter after aiming the plane toward the ground in a vertical dive. (Unbelievable as it might sound, the government’s response to the incident was not to implement security screening for ground personnel, but instead for pilots and flight attendants.)
1988: Pan Am flight 103 is carrying 259 people when it disintegrates a half-hour after takeoff from London-Heathrow. The majority of the wreckage falls onto the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 11 more people. The largest section, a flaming heap of wing and fuselage, drops onto the Sherwood Crescent area of the town, destroying twenty houses and ploughing a crater three stories deep. The concussion is so strong that Richter devices record a 1.6 magnitude tremor. Until you-know-what, the destruction of flight 103 represents the worst-ever terrorist attack against a civilian US target. One of the most intensive criminal investigations in history would bring two Libyan operatives, al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah and Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi, to trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. Fhimah was acquitted. Al-Megrahi was found guilty and sentenced to life, though he was released by the British government in 2009.
1989: Libya will also be held responsible for the bombing of UTA flight 772 nine months after Lockerbie. Most Americans don’t remember this incident, but it has never been forgotten in France. A hundred and seventy people from 17 countries, including seven Americans, were killed when an explosive device went off in the forward luggage hold of the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 on a flight from Brazzaville, Congo, to Paris. The wreckage fell into the Tenere region of the Sahara, in northern Niger, one of the planet’s most remote areas. A French court eventually convicted six Libyans in absentia for the murders, including Mohammar Khaddafy’s brother-in-law.
1989: In an attempt to kill police informants, members of a cocaine cartel blow up Avianca Flight 203 bound from Bogota to Cali. There are no survivors among the 110 crew and passengers.
1990: A young man claiming to have explosives strapped to his body forces his way into the cockpit of a Xiamen Airlines 737 and demands to be flown to Taiwan. Running out of fuel, the crew attempts a landing at Canton (Guangzhou), when a struggle erupts. The plane veers off the runway and collides with two stationary aircraft.
1994: Riding along as an auxiliary crewmember, Auburn Calloway, an off-duty Federal Express pilot scheduled for termination, attacks the three-man crew of a DC-10 with a speargun and hammer, nearly killing all of them. His plan, before he’s finally overtaken by the battered and bloodied pilots, is to crash the huge airliner into FedEx’s Memphis headquarters.
1994: An Air France A300 is stormed by a foursome of extremist Muslims in Algeria. The plane is forced to Marseilles where seven people die when French troops rush aboard for a rescue. An Air France pilot is seeing hurling himself out of a cockpit window while an explosion flashes behind him.
1996: An Ethiopian Air Lines 767 is skyjacked over the Indian Ocean. The jet runs out of fuel and heads for a ditching off the Comoros Islands. Skyjackers wrestle with the pilots, and the plane breaks apart upon hitting the water, killing 125.
1999: A deranged 28-year-old forces his way onto the flight deck of an All Nippon Airways 747 carrying 503 people and stabs the captain to death with an 8-inch knife.
1999: Air Botswana captain Chris Phatswe steals an otherwise empty ATR commuter plane and slams it into two parked aircraft, killing himself and destroying virtually the entire fleet of his nation’s tiny airline.
And not to forget what might have been. I’ll remind you again of the near success of the 1994 “Project Bojinka” conspiracy to bomb eleven widebody jets simultaneously over the Pacific Ocean. Bojinka, or “big bang,” was the brainchild of Ramzi Yousef, a master mixer of liquid explosives, and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The latter would go on to mastermind the September 11th attacks, while Yousef was, at the time, already a wanted man for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center prelude. The bombs, made from nitroglycerin, sulfuric acid, acetone and other chemicals, would be hidden with the under-seat life jackets. In 1995 Yousef completed a successful, small-level test run on a Philippine Airlines 747, killing a Japanese businessman. The plot was broken up after authorities investigated a chemical fire in the Manila apartment of one of Yousef’s accomplices.
via: Ask The Pilot
by Patrick Smith
In America and across much of the world, the security enhancements put in place following the September 11th catastrophe have been drastic and of two kinds: those practical and effective, and those irrational and pointless. The first variety have taken place almost entirely behind the scenes. Explosives scanning for checked luggage, for instance, was long overdue and is perhaps the most welcome addition. It’s the second variety, unfortunately, that have come to dominate the air travel experience, wasting our time and money and humiliating millions of flyers on a daily basis. Nearly ten years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, airport security remains a theater of the absurd.
There are two fundamental flaws in our approach:
The first is a strategy that looks upon everybody who flies — the old and young, fit and infirm, domestic and foreign, pilot and passenger — as a potential terrorist. That is to say, we’re searching for weapons rather than specific people who might actually use them. This is an impossible, unsustainable task in a nation where some two million people travel by air each day. I’ll remind you that tough-as-nails prison guards cannot keep knives out of maximum security cell blocks, never mind the idea of TSA guards trying to root out every conceivable weapon at an overcrowded airport. The second and related fundamental flaw is our foolish, lingering preoccupation with the tactics used by the terrorists on September 11th. To better understand, we need to revisit that Tuesday morning, and grasp exactly what it was that the 19 hijackers so easily took advantage of. Conventional wisdom says the terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling aboard boxcutters. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What they actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings. In years past, a takeover meant hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were trained in the concept of “passive resistance.” What weapons the 19 men possessed mattered little; had boxcutters been on the contraband list, the men would have smuggled something else or fashioned their weapons from items on board. It didn’t matter. The success of their plan relied not on weaponry but on the element of surprise. And in this respect, their scheme was all but guaranteed not to fail.
For a number of reasons, most notably the awareness of passengers and crew, just the opposite is now true. Before the first of the Twin Towers had fallen to the ground, that element of surprise, and the boxcutters that went with it, were no longer a useful tool. Paradigm over. Hijackers today would face a planeload of frightened people ready to fight back, and thus an unaffordable probability of failure. The September 11th scheme is kaput.
In spite of this reality, we are apparently content spending billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened and cannot happen again — guards pawing through our luggage in a hunt for what are effectively harmless items: hobby knives, scissors and screwdrivers. Not to mention, even a child knows that a deadly weapon can be fashioned from virtually anything, from a ballpoint pen to a broken first class dinner plate.
The folly is much the same with respect to the restrictions on liquids and gels, put in place following the break-up of a London-based cabal that was planning to blow up jetliners using liquid explosives. Allegations surrounding the conspiracy were revealed to substantially embellished. In an August, 2006 article in the New York Times, British officials admitted that public statements made following the arrests were overcooked, inaccurate, and “unfortunate.”
Among first to express serious skepticism about the bombers’ readiness was Thomas C. Greene, whose essay in The Register explored the extreme difficulty of mixing and deploying the types of binary explosives purportedly to be used. Green had conferred with Professor Jimmie C. Oxley, an explosives specialist who has closely studied the type of deadly cocktail coveted by the London plotters.
“The notion that deadly explosives can be cooked up in an airplane lavatory is pure fiction,” Greene said during an interview. “A handy gimmick for action movies and shows like ’24.’ The reality proves disappointing: it’s rather awkward to do chemistry in an airplane toilet. Nevertheless, our official protectors and deciders respond to such notions instinctively, because they’re familiar to us: we’ve all seen scenarios on television and in the cinema. This, incredibly, is why you can no longer carry a bottle of water onto a plane.”
The threat of liquid explosives does exist, but they cannot be readily brewed from the kinds of liquids we have devoted most of our resources to keeping from planes. “I would not hesitate to allow that liquid explosives can pose a danger,” Greene added, recalling Ramzi Yousef’s detonation of a small nitroglycerine bomb aboard Philippine Airlines Flight 434 in 1994. The explosion was a test run for the so-called “Project Bojinka,” the long-forgotten Al-Qaeda scheme to simultaneously destroy a dozen widebody airliners over the Pacific Ocean. “But the idea that confiscating someone’s toothpaste is going to keep us safe is too ridiculous to entertain.”
But of all the contradictions and self-defeating measures TSA has come up with, none could be more ludicrous than the policy decreeing that pilots and flight attendants undergo the same x-ray and metal detector screening as passengers. What makes it ludicrous is that tens of thousands of other airport workers, from baggage loaders and fuelers to cabin cleaners and maintenance personnel, are subject only to occasional random screenings when they come to work. These are individuals with full access to aircraft, inside and out. Some are airline employees, though a high percentage are contract staff belonging to outside companies. An airline pilot who once flew bombers armed with nuclear weapons, and who has undergone rigorous background checks prior to employment, is not to be trusted, and is marched through the metal detectors before every flight. But those who cater the galleys, sling the suitcases and sweep out the aisles, amble through a turnstile unmolested.
That’s not to imply that caterers, baggage handlers, cabin cleaners, and the rest of the exempted ground workers are dangerous. Nevertheless, this is a double standard so staggeringly audacious that it can hardly be believed. TSA actually looks us in the eye and tells us that pilots “need” be screened — as it waives screening for tarmac workers. If there is a more ringing let-me-get-this-straight scenario anywhere in the realm of airport security, I’d like to hear it. On the one hand we give our enemies all the credit in the world — requiring toddlers to take their shoes off, for instance — yet we hardly hesitate in offering up loopholes big enough to steer a 767 through.
Here’s a true story:
I’ve just worked a flight coming from overseas. I’m wearing my full uniform, and have all of my gear with me. The plan is to run upstairs and leave my flight bag in the crew room before catching my commuter flight home. Unfortunately this means having to endure arrival screening, one of airport security’s most irritating protocols. After clearing customs, passengers and crew alike face the x-ray line and metal detector before they’re allowed back into the concourse. (This inconvenient rule is in place because of another inconvenient rule — the one that makes connecting passengers claim and re-check their luggage when arriving from places outside the United States — even though their bags have already been screened at the point of departure. The thinking is that people could unpack this or that dangerous item from a checked suitcase — a four-ounce bottle of shampoo say — then carry it to the next flight.)
So, together with a throng of exhausted passengers I’m funneled into the grimy, dimly lit checkpoint. I hoist my crew bags onto the x-ray belt, then pass through the metal detector. Once on the other side, I’m waiting for my stuff to reappear when suddenly the belt comes to a stop. “Bag check!” shouts the guard behind the monitor.
The bag she’s talking about turns out to be my roll-aboard. A second guard, a mean-looking woman whose girth is exceeded only by the weight of the chip on her shoulder, comes over and yanks it from the machine.
“Is this yours?” she wants to know.
“Yes, it’s mine.”
“You got a knife in here?”
“A knife?”
“A knife,” she barks. Some silverware?”
Yes I do. I always do. Inside my roll-aboard I carry a spare set of airline-issue cutlery – a spoon, a fork, and a knife. Along with packets of noodles and other small snacks, this is part of my hotel survival kit, useful in the event of short layovers when food isn’t available. Borrowed from my collection of airline silverware (some of us really have such things), it’s the exact cutlery that accompanies your meal on a long-haul flight. The pieces are stainless steel, and about five inches long. The knife has a rounded end and a short row of teeth — I would call them serrations, but that’s too strong a word. For all intents and purposes, it’s a miniature butter knife.
“Yes,” I tell the guard. “There’s a metal knife in there – a butterknife.”
She opens the compartment and takes out a small vinyl case containing the three pieces. After removing the knife, she holds it upward between with two fingers and stares at me coldly. Her pose is like that of an angry schoolteacher about to berate a child for bringing some forbidden object to class.
“You ain’t takin’ this through,” she says. “No knifes [sic]. You can’t bring a knife through here.”
It takes a moment for me to realize that she’s serious. “I’m… but…. it’s…”
“Sorry.” She throws it into a bin and starts to walk away.
“Wait a minute,” I say. “That’s airline silverware.”
“Don’t matter what it is. You can’t bring knifes through here.”
“Ma’am, that’s an airline knife. It’s the knife they give you on the plane.”
“No knifes. Have a good afternoon, sir.”
“You can’t be serious,” I say.
With that she grabs the knife out of the bin and walks over to one of her colleagues, seated at the end of the checkpoint in a folding chair. I follow her over.
“This guy wants to bring this through.”
The man in the chair looks up lazily. “Is it serrated?”
She hands it to him. He looks at it quickly, then addresses me.
“No, this is no good. You can’t take this.”
“Why not?”
“It’s serrated.” He is talking about the little row of teeth along the edge. Truth be told, the knife in question, which I’ve had for years, is actually smaller and less sharp than the knives currently handed out by my airline to its first and business class customers. You’d be hard pressed to cut a slice of toast with it.
“Oh come on.”
“What do you call these?” He runs his finger along the miniscule serrations.
“Those… but… they… it…”
“No serrated knives. You can’t take this.”
“But sir, how can it not be allowed when it’s the same knife they give you on the plane!”
“Those are the rules.”
“That’s impossible. Can I please speak to a supervisor?”
“I am the supervisor.”
There are those moments in life when time stands still and the air around you seems to solidify. You stand there in an amber of absurdity, waiting for the crowd to burst out laughing and the “Candid Camera” guy to appear from around the corner.
Except the supervisor is dead serious.
Realizing that I’m not getting my knife back, I try for the consolation prize, which is getting the man to admit that, if nothing else, the rule makes no sense. “Come on,” I argue. “The purpose of confiscating knives is to keep people from bringing them onto planes, right? But the people planes are legally handed these knives with their meals. Plus, I’m the pilot! How can you… I mean… it’s just… At least admit to me that it’s a dumb rule.”
“It’s not a dumb rule.”
“Yes it is.”
“Not it isn’t.”
And so on, until he asks me to leave.
What happened to me was wrong on so many levels that it’s hard to keep them straight. Just for starters, do I really need to point out that an airline pilot at the controls of his plane would hardly need a butter knife is he desired to inflict damage?
Now a liquids story:
One day in 2006 my mother caused a small commotion at a checkpoint at Boston-Logan after screeners discovered a container of homemade tomato sauce in her bag. What with the preponderance of spaghetti grenades and lasagna bombs, we can all be proud of their vigilance; and, as a liquid, tomato sauce is in clear violation of the TSA’s carry-on statutes. But this time there was a wrinkle: the sauce was frozen.
The icy red block had the guards in a scramble. Liquid, solid, gel, what was it? A supervisor was called over to assess things. He spent several moments stroking his chin. Drawing from an exquisite knowledge of refrigeration, he observantly sized things up. “It’s not a liquid right now,” he noted. “But it will be soon.”
“I wonder if this isn’t a test,” murmured another guard.
“Please,” urged my mother. “Please don’t take away my dinner.”
Lo and behold, they did not. Whether out of confusion, sympathy, or embarrassment, she was allowed to pass with her murderous marinara.
This got me thinking. The proper course of action, need it be said, would be for TSA to overhaul its entire approach. For several reasons — not the least of which is the traveling public’s apparent eagerness to be subjugated, harassed, and humiliated — this is not going to happen, but is it too much to ask, in consolation, for the agency to exhibit a little common sense now and then, sanctioning some flexibility in its protocols? If we’re to believe that TSA screeners are highly trained professionals, as the agency maintains, can they not handle the responsibility of an occasional judgment call, some on-the-spot decision-making?
“Our screeners are allowed to exercise leeway in some cases,” a TSA spokesperson told me. “They have the training, and the obligation, to exercise discretion.” Maybe, but the tomato sauce incident notwithstanding, I’m not seeing much leeway and discretion. I’m seeing blind adherence to rules. I’m seeing a draconian obsession with the exactness of container volumes and the dimensions of harmless objects, up to and including whether or not a crewmember’s tiny knife has serrations on its blade, as if they alone could be the difference between unsafe and safe. Enforcement of this kind transcends mere tedium and becomes downright dangerous. Maybe you’ve heard the story about a test in which TSA screeners are presented with a suitcase containing a mock explosive device with a water bottle nestled next to it. They ferret out the water, of course, while the bomb goes sailing through.
Photo by author
Notice too the uniforms worn by TSA. Screeners are now called “officers” and they wear blue shirts and silver badges. Not by accident, the shirts and badges look exactly like the kind worn by police. Mission-creep, this is called. In fact TSA workers do not have law enforcement power — much as the agency has done a good job at fooling people into believing otherwise. TSA holds the authority — legitimately enough in my opinion — to inspect your belongings and prevent you from passing through a checkpoint. However, it does not have the authority to interrogate you, force you to recite the national anthem, or otherwise compromise your rights. Both TSA and the traveling public need to remember this.
“It’ll go a long way to enhance the respect of this workforce,” voiced one TSA “officer” after the new uniforms were unveiled in 2008. No, sorry, that’s not it. You don’t bully and fool people into respecting you.
In early 2010, things were taken to the next level with the introduction of full-body scanners at European and U.S. airports. This is the latest and one of the more disheartening developments in our long war on the abstract noun called terrorism. What’s next, we have to ask, in this unwinnable arms race / shell game? Where will it end? Or is this the end?
We’re asked to believe the scanners are a critical tool. Yet they are being deployed domestically rather than at airports overseas, and only sporadically at that. Should a bomber notice a scanner at one checkpoint, he merely needs to choose the next one down. And here’s where it’s easy to be cynical. Instead of body scanners, why not rely on bomb-sniffing dogs? They’re at least as effective, unobtrusive, and much cheaper (and cuter besides). I suspect it’s because there isn’t a big corporation somewhere that stands to earn billions from the deployment of dogs. It’s doubtful the scanners are making us safer. But rest assured they’re making somebody wealthy.
Apparently this is acceptable. If, a decade ago, we were told that people would soon have to appear naked in order to board an airplane, the claim would have been met by peals of laughter, if not howls of outrage. But here it has come to pass, and our reaction, aside from one or two muffled complaints, has been a sheep-like acquiescence.
“If it means we’re safer….” We hear that a lot. Except, ignoring for a minute the perils of swapping away rights for security, people don’t mean it. After all, you’re far more likely to be killed in a highway crash than be blown up on an airliner, so why aren’t we out there spending billions and stripping away liberties in the name of highway safety? We still hear righteous cries of fascism any time the cops set up DWI roadblocks — heaven forbid “the man” make me blow into a tube — but sure, I’ll doff my boxers if it protects me from “terror.”
No less frustrating is the strained notion that, beginning with the events of September 11th, air travel suddenly entered a brand new age of unprecedented danger and threat. We’re asked to accept some “new reality” of air travel, when really the risks aren’t much different than they were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. The attacks of 2001 stand as terrorism’s defining spectacle, and the ongoing threat of future attacks cannot be denied.
However, acts of political violence against civil aviation are hardly a recent phenomenon. In fact we see far fewer of them than we used to. By comprison, once can remember the 1970s and 1980s as sort of Golden Age of Air Crimes, rich with hijackings and bombings. Over one five-year span between 1985 and 1989 we can count at least six high-profile terrorist attacks against commercial planes or airports. These include the horrific bombings of Pan Am 103 and UTA 772, the bombing of an Air India 747 over the North Atlantic that killed 329 people, and the saga of TWA flight 847.
Flight 847, headed from Athens to Rome, was hijacked by Shiite militiamen armed with grenades and pistols. The purloined 727 then embarked on a remarkable, 17-day odyssey to Lebanon, Algeria, and back again. At one point passengers are removed, split into groups and held captive in downtown Beirut. The photograph of TWA captain John Testrake, his head out the cockpit window, collared by a gun-wielding terrorist, was broadcast worldwide and became an unforgettable icon of the siege.
I say “unforgettable” but that’s just the thing. How many Americans remember flight 847? We act as if the clock didn’t began ticking until September 11th, 2001. In truth we’ve been dealing with this stuff for decades. It’s astonishing how short our memories are. And partly because they’re so short, we are easily frightened and manipulated.
Imagine TWA 847 happening tomorrow. Imagine six successful terror attacks against commercial aviation in a five-year span. The airline industry would be paralyzed, the populace frozen in abject fear. It would be a catastrophe of epic proportion — of wall-to-wall coverage and, dare I suggest, the summary surrender of important civil liberties. What is it about us, as a nation, that has made us so unable to remember, and unable to cope?
So, enough of what we shouldn’t be doing. What about things we should be doing? If I’m going to spend all this time complaining, it’s only fair that I offer up some solutions, no?
Security overall ought to be scaled back, into a leaner but more focused operation. First up, every dime currently being spent looking for pointy objects, double-checking people’s IDs and confiscating innocuous liquids needs to be reallocated. I wouldn’t say that we have too much security, necessarily, but we certainly have too much in the wrong places, out of synch with the hierarchy of threat.
The primary threat to commercial planes is, was, and shall remain, bombs. Thus every piece of luggage, both checked and carry-on, ought to be carefully scrutinized for explosives. They already are, actually, though I reckon we could be doing a more thorough job of it. With an emphasis on airports outside the United States. The likeliest point of entry for a bomb is not Omaha or Tucson. I’d suggest reallocate at least 30 percent of resources to airports overseas.
Scrutinizing passengers themselves is a little trickier. Body-scanners, for all their controversy, are an admittedly effective tool, but another idea is the more widespread use those explosives-sniffing “puffer” machines now in sporadic deployment. It’d be expensive and technologically challenging, yes, but made more affordable by eliminating much of what’s currently in place. Meanwhile, an x-ray and magnometer check for guns and large knives is perfectly reasonable.
And perhaps it’s time to put greater emphasis on passenger profiling. Profiling is a dirty word to some, but it needn’t be a one-dimensional preoccupation with skin color or national origin. Indeed, as any security specialist will tell you, racial profiling doesn’t work. Routine is weakness, and the more predictable our methods are, the easier they are to defeat. Effective profiling uses a multi-point approach that takes in a wide range of characteristics, both tangible and behavioral. TSA has in fact been training staff in the finer points of behavioral pattern recognition. That’s good, thought for the time being screeners are a lot more adept at picking out scissors and shampoo bottles than picking out terrorists.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has proposed a plan in which passengers will be categorized into one of three risk groups, and then screened accordingly. Biometric proof-of-identity, such as a fingerprint or encoded passport, will be checked against a stored profile containing various personal data, and also against watch lists. This, together with flight booking data will determine which of three lines a traveler is then assigned to. Those in the first line would receive little more than a cursory bag check, while those in the third line would be subject to an enhanced inspection similar to the TSA procedures that are currently applied to everybody. This wouldn’t be perfect — and like many people, I get a little nervous when I hear the words “biometric” and “profile containing various personal data” — but it’s maybe the best idea yet when it comes to restoring sanity to airport security.
IATA says that an early version of the three-tiered system could be up and running in under three years. That is, if governments cooperate. Most, I feel, will be willing to give it a try. The European Union, for example, has expressed an eagerness to phase out the silly restrictions on liquids.
It’s not the Europeans that make me nervous, it’s the Americans. IATA is making sense, but I’m sad to say it lacks the clout — and the inertia — of the US Department of Homeland Security. Enacting these changes would take, more than anything else, the political courage of our President and Congress. We have thus far seen almost no political opposition, bipartisan or otherwise, to TSA’s ponderous and intrusive methods. While I hate to sounds like a conspiracy theorist, our leaders talk and act as if they enjoy the status quo, unwilling to disenfranchise any facet of what has become a vast and profitable security industry.
Then we’ve got TSA itself. No doubt it sees the IATA proposal as a threat, and is likely to fight it tooth and nail. The agency is now firmly, perhaps irrevocably entrenched, and has grown giddy with power — the power that our leaders have granted it, aided and abetted by a lethargic populace and an irresponsible media. No idea, however useful, will withstand the opposition of a government entity that effectively answers to nobody.
And the next terrorist attack, or even a close call, is liable to wipe out any enthusiasm IATA is able to drum up, and re-set the clock.
It doesn’t need to be this way. The solution is out there. Give us good intelligence-gathering and law enforcement, together with on-site random searches, thorough explosives scanning, and smartly managed profiling, and what have we got? A security strategy that is frankly pretty good. As good as it can be, anyway.
But then, how far do we go? How far should we go? I haven’t even touched on the deadly dangers of shoulder-launched missiles and other military-grade weapons available around the globe. You could hunker down unseen in any of a thousand neighborhoods abutting a major airport, armed with a portable launcher or a gun loaded with pyrophoric shells. Hell, inducing panic needn’t involve an airplane at all. An explosion in a crowded terminal would have basically the same impact as a downing a plane (the concept is not new; airport terminals have been attacked in years past.) How do we meet a threat that is able to take on so many forms and employ so many deadly tactics? Do we x-ray every cabin cleaner’s lunchpail, every gate agent’s knapsack? Do we bulletproof every plane and spend billions putting anti-missile devices into their bellies? Do we turn our airports into armed fortresses?
To some extent, this is the path we have chosen. Yet somewhere beneath all of this rests the uncomfortable, seldom acknowledged fact that no matter how hard we try, we’re never going to make our airports and airplanes completely safe. Neither all the determination in the world nor the most sweeping regulations we dare codify, will outsmart a cunning enough saboteur. Sound, competent security greatly improves our chances, whether against the concoctions of a single deranged individual or organized terror from the caves of Central Asia. But with the advent of every new technology or pledge of better safeguards, we correspondingly inspire the imaginations of those who wish to defeat us. There will always be a way to skirt the system. Coming to terms with this isn’t easy — and neither is it the same as rolling over. We can and should improve our odds. Doing so, however, requires us to be the one thing we thus far haven’t been: reasonable.
We also need to acknowledge that the real job of keeping terrorists and criminals away from planes is not the job of airport screeners in the first place. Rather, it’s the job of government agencies and law enforcement. It’s not very glamorous, but the grunt work of hunting down terrorists takes place far off stage, relying on the diligent work of cops, spies, and intelligence officers. Air crimes need to be stopped at the planning stages. By the time a terrorist gets to the airport, chances are it’s too late. And defusing the rage of angry radicals is a long-term anthropological mission for our leaders, not an excuse to barricade public spaces or subvert freedoms. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of Semtex, and there’s little to gain by bogging down resources in what amounts to a feel-good fantasy.
In the end, I’m not sure which is more troubling, the inanity of the existing regulations or the average American’s acceptance of them. These ineffective protocols have solidified into what appears to be indefinite policy, part and parcel of a greater security-industrial complex, with little or no opposition. There ought to be a tide of opposition rising up against this mania. Where is it? At its loudest, the voice of the traveling public is one of grumbly resignation. The op-ed pages are silent, the pundits have nothing meaningful to say.
The airlines, for their part, are in something of a bind. The willingness of our carriers to allow flying to become an increasingly unpleasant experience suggests a business sense of masochistic capitulation. On the other hand, imagine the outrage among security zealots should airlines be caught lobbying for what is perceived to be a dangerous abrogation of security and responsibility — even if it’s not. Carriers caught plenty of flack, almost all of it unfair, in the aftermath of September 11th. Understandably, they no longer want that liability.
How we got to this point is an interesting study in reactionary politics, fear mongering, and a disconcerting willingness of the American public to accept almost anything, no matter how illogical, inconvenient or unreasonable, in the name of security. Conned and frightened, our country demands not actual security, but security spectacle. And although a reasonable percentage of passengers, along with most security experts, would concur such theater serves no useful purpose, there has been surprisingly little protest. In that regard, maybe we’ve gotten exactly the system we deserve.
PERSPECTIVE: THE GOLDEN AGE OF AIR CRIMES….
1970: A Pan Am 747 bound for New York is skyjacked after takeoff from Amsterdam. The flight is diverted to Cairo where all of the 170 occupants are released. Radicals then blow up the plane.
1970: In the so-called “Black September” hijackings, five jets, including ones belonging to TWA, Pan Am, and Israel’s El Al, are commandeered over Europe over a three-day span by a group called the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Three of the five planes are diverted to a remote airstrip in Jordan, rigged with explosives and blown up. A fourth is flown to Egypt and destroyed there. All passengers had been freed before the aircraft were demolished.
1971: A man using the name DB Cooper skyjacks and threatens to blow up a Northwest Orient (Northwest Airlines nowadays) 727. He parachutes out the back of the plane with a hefty ransom and is never seen again, dead or alive.
1972: A JAT (Yugoslav Airlines) DC-9 en route from Copenhagen to Zagreb explodes at 33,000 feet. The Ustashe, a.k.a. Croatian National Movement, admits to the bombing.
1972: Explosion aboard a Cathay Pacific jet flying from Bangkok to Hong Kong kills 81 people. A Thai police lieutenant is accused of hiding the bomb in order to murder his fiancée.
1972: In the arrivals lounge of the Lod airport near Tel Aviv, three men from the Japanese Red Army, recruited by the Palestinian PLFP, open fire with machine guns and grenades, killing 26 people and injuring 80.
1973: As passengers board a Pan Am 747 at the airport in Rome, terrorists spray the plane with gunfire and toss grenades into the cabin, killing 30.
1973: Eighty-one perish as an Aeroflot jet explodes over Siberia during an attempted skyjacking.
1974: A TWA 707 flying from Athens to Rome (part of Tel Aviv-New York service), falls into the sea near Greece, the result of an explosive device hidden in the aft cargo compartment.
1974: A man detonates two grenades aboard an Air Vietnam 727 when the crew refuses to fly him to Hanoi.
1976: A Cubana DC-8 crashes near Barbados killing 73. An anti-Castro exile and three alleged accomplices are put on trial but acquitted for lack of evidence.
1977: Both pilots of a Malaysian Airline System (today called Malaysia Airlines) 737 are shot by a skyjacker. The plane crashes into a swamp.
1985: the Abu Nidal group kills 20 people in a pair of coordinated ticket-counter assaults at airports in Vienna and Rome.
1985: Shiite militiamen armed with grenades and pistols overtake TWA Flight 847 traveling (again) from Athens to Rome. The purloined 727 then embarks on a remarkable, 17-day odyssey to Lebanon, Algeria, and back again. At one point passengers are removed, split into groups, and held captive in downtown Beirut. The sole casualty is a U.S. Navy diver who is shot in the temple and dumped on the tarmac. All remaining hostages are eventually released, but not before the Israeli government agrees to free more than 700 Shiite fighters captured in southern Lebanon. The photograph of TWA captain John Testrake, his head out the cockpit window, collared by a gun-wielding terrorist, was broadcast worldwide and became an unforgettable icon of the siege.
1985: An Air India 747 on a service between Toronto and Bombay is bombed over the North Atlantic by Sikh extremists. The 329 fatalities remain history’s worst single-plane act of terrorism. A second bomb, intended for another Air India 747, detonates prematurely in Tokyo before being loaded.
1986: As TWA flight 840 descends through 10,000 feet toward Athens, a bomb goes off in the cabin. Four people are ejected through a tear in the 727′s fuselage.
1986: At Karachi international airport, a Pan Am 747 is preparing for departure when four heavily armed members of the Abu Nidal group seize the aircraft. When Pakistani forces storm the plane, the terrorists begin shooting and lobbing grenades. Twenty-two passengers are killed, and 150 are wounded. Although all four terrorists were captured and sent to prison in Pakistan, they were released in 2001.
1987: A Korean Air Lines 707 disappears over the Andaman Sea en route from Baghdad to Seoul. One of two Koreans suspected of hiding a bomb commits suicide before he’s arrested. His accomplice, a young woman, confesses to leaving the device — fashioned from both plastic and liquid explosives — in an overhead rack before disembarking during an intermediate stop. Condemned to death, the woman is pardoned in 1990 by the president of South Korea.
1987: At LAX, a recently fired employee, David Burke, sneaks a loaded gun past security and boards a Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) jet on its way to San Francisco. During cruise he breaks into the cockpit, shoots both pilots, then noses the airplane into the ground near Harmony, California, killing all 44 on board. he gains access to the cockpit and shoots both pilots and himself, the latter after aiming the plane toward the ground in a vertical dive. (Unbelievable as it might sound, the government’s response to the incident was not to implement security screening for ground personnel, but instead for pilots and flight attendants.)
1988: Pan Am flight 103 is carrying 259 people when it disintegrates a half-hour after takeoff from London-Heathrow. The majority of the wreckage falls onto the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 11 more people. The largest section, a flaming heap of wing and fuselage, drops onto the Sherwood Crescent area of the town, destroying twenty houses and ploughing a crater three stories deep. The concussion is so strong that Richter devices record a 1.6 magnitude tremor. Until you-know-what, the destruction of flight 103 represents the worst-ever terrorist attack against a civilian US target. One of the most intensive criminal investigations in history would bring two Libyan operatives, al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah and Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi, to trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. Fhimah was acquitted. Al-Megrahi was found guilty and sentenced to life, though he was released by the British government in 2009.
1989: Libya will also be held responsible for the bombing of UTA flight 772 nine months after Lockerbie. Most Americans don’t remember this incident, but it has never been forgotten in France. A hundred and seventy people from 17 countries, including seven Americans, were killed when an explosive device went off in the forward luggage hold of the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 on a flight from Brazzaville, Congo, to Paris. The wreckage fell into the Tenere region of the Sahara, in northern Niger, one of the planet’s most remote areas. A French court eventually convicted six Libyans in absentia for the murders, including Mohammar Khaddafy’s brother-in-law.
1989: In an attempt to kill police informants, members of a cocaine cartel blow up Avianca Flight 203 bound from Bogota to Cali. There are no survivors among the 110 crew and passengers.
1990: A young man claiming to have explosives strapped to his body forces his way into the cockpit of a Xiamen Airlines 737 and demands to be flown to Taiwan. Running out of fuel, the crew attempts a landing at Canton (Guangzhou), when a struggle erupts. The plane veers off the runway and collides with two stationary aircraft.
1994: Riding along as an auxiliary crewmember, Auburn Calloway, an off-duty Federal Express pilot scheduled for termination, attacks the three-man crew of a DC-10 with a speargun and hammer, nearly killing all of them. His plan, before he’s finally overtaken by the battered and bloodied pilots, is to crash the huge airliner into FedEx’s Memphis headquarters.
1994: An Air France A300 is stormed by a foursome of extremist Muslims in Algeria. The plane is forced to Marseilles where seven people die when French troops rush aboard for a rescue. An Air France pilot is seeing hurling himself out of a cockpit window while an explosion flashes behind him.
1996: An Ethiopian Air Lines 767 is skyjacked over the Indian Ocean. The jet runs out of fuel and heads for a ditching off the Comoros Islands. Skyjackers wrestle with the pilots, and the plane breaks apart upon hitting the water, killing 125.
1999: A deranged 28-year-old forces his way onto the flight deck of an All Nippon Airways 747 carrying 503 people and stabs the captain to death with an 8-inch knife.
1999: Air Botswana captain Chris Phatswe steals an otherwise empty ATR commuter plane and slams it into two parked aircraft, killing himself and destroying virtually the entire fleet of his nation’s tiny airline.
And not to forget what might have been. I’ll remind you again of the near success of the 1994 “Project Bojinka” conspiracy to bomb eleven widebody jets simultaneously over the Pacific Ocean. Bojinka, or “big bang,” was the brainchild of Ramzi Yousef, a master mixer of liquid explosives, and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The latter would go on to mastermind the September 11th attacks, while Yousef was, at the time, already a wanted man for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center prelude. The bombs, made from nitroglycerin, sulfuric acid, acetone and other chemicals, would be hidden with the under-seat life jackets. In 1995 Yousef completed a successful, small-level test run on a Philippine Airlines 747, killing a Japanese businessman. The plot was broken up after authorities investigated a chemical fire in the Manila apartment of one of Yousef’s accomplices.
via: Ask The Pilot
