e declined. Even after a bomb exploded in the baggage hold of Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988, claiming 270 lives, reforms were slow, at best. The government proposed expanded baggage safety checks, but airlines objected that the checks would take too long so the government backed down (Rohrlich 2001). Instead an airline proposal to take a slow approach was adopted.A key premise of the go-slow approach was that domestic airlines were not significantly threatened by bombings. But signs were accumulating that this was wishful thinking. In 1993, a truck bomb placed by terrorists went off at the World Trade Center. The next year, a man who was later convicted in that attack, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, was arrested. His laptop computer contained plans to blow up 12 United, Delta and Northwest flights originating in East Asia and bound for the United States (Rohrlich 2001). When TWA Flight 800 exploded shortly after leaving New York's JFK Airport in July 1996, the U.S. government finally was jolted into action. Speculation abounded that the explosion was the work of terrorists, but the crash turned out to have been caused by a fuel tank malfunction. The presidential commission already impaneled to recommend security fixes because of this crash was essentially ineffective. As late as 1999, the airlines continued to complain that the extra security measures would cause unnecessary and unbearable delays to the traveler and eventually hurt business. To justify its position to increase baggage checks, the FAA did a cost-benefit analysis that showed that one plane blowing up would justify 10 years' worth of increased costs to the industry. Even with a detailed explanation by the FAA that increased security measures would be fiscally beneficial, the airlines continued to drag their feet. Two years later, nothing substantial to screen luggage had been done (Murphy & Brinkley, 2001). Screening luggage for explosives is not the only problem with airline...
