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The fact that there is a terrorist threat against our nation’s airline industry has not changed, but the methods that these radicals employ to bring harm to travelers has grown much more sophisticated. The techniques in use by the government and the airline industry to prevent a catastrophic event have not kept pace. As the events of September 11th unfolded, it became obvious that the havoc a well-planned terrorist attack could wreak on a nation, or even the world had been taken to a new level. Nothing these terrorists did was novel, yet the idea of a well-coordinated attack using commercial aircraft as weapons of destruction was completely new. Now, as the images of hijacked airplanes plowing into the World Trade Center are still fresh in our minds, we must take full advantage of the emotion and will of the people as well as technology to bring effective airline security measures in line with current and future threats. Effective Airline Security Measures Are Overdue How long does it take the United States to counter a threat to commercial aviation? In the case of a bomb stowed in luggage in the belly of an airliner, the answer is nearly half a century…and counting. In 1955, a man placed a bomb in his mother's suitcase and blew up a United Airlines flight over Colorado (Rohrlich 2001). Although not recognized at the time, this was the beginning of a new form of terrorism, a new crisis for our nation to face. This crisis was crystallized on March 9, 1972, as a jetliner took off from JFK bound for Los Angeles. Moments into the flight, an anonymous caller stated that there was a bomb on board that flight. The plane immediately returned to JFK and passengers were evacuated. A bomb-sniffing dog detected an explosives device just 12 minutes before it was set to detonate (Federal Aviation Administration, 2001). Seven months later, the Department of Transportation created the K-9 Explosives Detection Team Program (Federal Aviation Administration, 2001). This was the first widespread measure taken to combat the threat of blowing up commercial airlines. Through the years, the role of K-9 teams has grown and the value of well-trained, proficient explosives detection teams in the airport environment has proven effective, but this was not an effective solution to the entire threat. Terrorist threats and hijackings, many involving live explosives, plagued civil aviation again in the early 1970s. It took another disaster and more than a decade for the U.S. government to again take a serious look at airline security. This push was provided by the June 1985 plunge into the sea of an Air India flight near Ireland as the result of a powerful explosion in its cargo hold and a hijacking the next month of TWA Flight 847 from Athens. (Federal Aviation Administration, 2001) The FAA ordered U.S. air carriers to tighten security at major airports in other countries. And U.S. air carriers overseas were under FAA orders to match every piece of luggage with every passenger to defeat the possibility that a terrorist might check a suitcase containing a bomb, then not take the flight. Since that date, more than 24 fatal explosions have been recorded on aircraft around the world. Despite this evidence, the U.S. has made little real progress toward countering such threats to our airlines and their passengers. Today, only a small percentage of passenger baggage on domestic flights is screened for explosives. (Federal Aviation Administration) U.S. officials historically have responded to aviation disasters by proposing flurries of security measures, only to roll back many of them when airlines objected and the public's focus on the issue 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 security, maybe not even the most pressing problem. Much emphasis has been placed in this area, and rightfully so, but it should not be at the expense of other concerns. After all, the acts of September 11th would not have been prevented with better luggage screening for explosives. It is widely speculated that the highjackers of September 11th, carried their weapons (knives or box cutters) on board their persons or in their hand-carried baggage. This opens at least three additional areas that need improvement: cockpit security/reinforcement, checkpoint security/screeners, and passenger identification/screening. Cockpit security/reinforcement has already begun, but the security bar being installed in aircraft today, will stop only the disgruntled passenger. A trained and prepared terrorist could easily gain entrance to an aircraft’s cockpit either by brute force or by coaxing the pilot/copilot. A better method of securing the cockpits needs to be instituted. The double security doors employed by Israel's national carrier, El Al, (Dunn, R, 2001) should be the model used to emulate. This, coupled with a security camera in the isolation area between the double doors, would provide far superior protection. Although protection of the cockpit is the quickest and probably the cheapest area for improvement, it cannot be expected that this alone would have prevented the World Trade Center catastrophe. Other areas of security were also deficient. How could have security personnel had detected the box cutters or knives prior to the terrorists boarding their respective aircraft? Better scanning equipment seems to be the overwhelming first answer to this question. Along with better scanning equipment must also come fully trained employees operating this equipment. This, in its self, is a multi-faceted problem that has been growing for years and requires more than just a new law or two. Government investigations have repeatedly pointed to security checkpoints as a weak link in airport security. Screeners are hired through private companies under contract with airlines to staff checkpoints. High turnover and low wages make for a vulnerable workforce, while subcontracting of the job results in little oversight (Cohen & Barens, 2001). The FAA, required to oversee and certify airport security, is imposing stricter security standards but these alone will not fix this problem. A systematic plan to increase wages, improve training, and even add prestige to the job must be implemented. This will take time and strict oversight by the federal government must be followed through, if private firms are going to be allowed to continue to provide this essential service to the flying public. One area many lawmakers are reluctant to enter is that of “profiling” passengers. According to Robert Berkebile a member of the National Research Council panel on airline security, "Profiling is a naughty, naughty word" (Hiltzik & Willman, 2001). Naughty or not, it is an area that must be dealt with. A 1997 report of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, headed by then Vice President Al Gore, submitted the profiling standards to a panel of experts in privacy and foreign relations and representatives of such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The panel asked that the profiling standards not be based on anything of "a constitutionally suspect nature," such as race, religion or national origin of U.S. citizens. The commission further recommended that the airlines and government be forbidden from maintaining permanent databases on so-called selectees--people selected by a computer-assisted passenger screening software program for closer scrutiny--and that the entire system should only remain in place until "explosive detection systems are reliable and fully deployed" (Hiltzik et al.). This is a startling sign of the naive, prevailing assumption before Sept. 11 that explosives, not people, represented the real threat. Before the mass hijacking, no one had anticipated a scenario where extremists would turn not just themselves, but whole planes, into suicide bombs. Our lawmakers need to realize that terrorists of the past are not like the current and certainly cannot be expected to be like those of the future. The only way the nation's air-travel industry can recover from the critical damage of September’s terrorism is through dramatic upgrading of security at airports and aboard airliners. We must take full advantage of our world leadership in technology and apply it towards safeguarding our flying public. Technology can let the human intervene in security more effectively, by checking the false positives, as opposed to making the humans look at all luggage and each passenger individually. Bibliography: References Cohen, L., Barens, M. (2001, September 13). Checkpoint screeners weak link in system. Retrieved December 3, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-01-09130336sep13.story Dunn, R. (2001, September 26). Reinforced cabins, armed guards: the El AL model. Retrieved December 3, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://www.smh.com.au/news/0109/26/world.html Federal Aviation Administration (November 24, 2001). External Security. Retrieved November 24, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://cas.faa.gov.edtp.html Hiltzik, M., Willman, D., (2001, September 23). How did U.S. Airport Security Break Down. Retrieved December 3, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-092301 airsec.story Murphy, D., & Brinkley J. (2001, September). Rethinking Airport Security. Retrieved December 3, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://.nytimes.com/2001/09/19/nyregion/19airp.html Rohrlich, T. (2001, November 5). A Gap in Aviation Security. Retrieved November 25, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://latimes.com/new/nationworld/nation.html Word Count: 1704
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