There was a time when the name of Freddie Laker’s “Skytrain” airline was a fairly accurate description of how simple flying could become. Turn up; hop on; fly off. That has all changed — not because of the demands of technology, but rather those of terrorists who feel that the most effective way to impose their wholly unaccepted political points on others is to blow an airplane out of the sky.
Moreover, changes in air travel security have a history that inclines very much toward responding to the last major incident. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, probably the greatest initiator to change was the downing of PA103 on Dec. 21 1988 over the town of Lockerbie in Scotland on a flight from London to New York. Whoever was behind the attack on the airliner and the deaths of all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground, it was carried out by a using bag to carry an explosive device, probably one of 136 loaded at Frankfurt on the preceding leg of the flight.
It was a breach of security. But to claim that it could not happen again would be recklessly foolish. Although a whole industry of airline security has bloomed since 1988, it still has not been able to secure the weakest link in the chain: the human factor. Immediately post-Lockerbie, the British Airports Authority cooperated with the UK’s state regulator, the then Department of Transport, to develop new technologies and procedwures. The result was what is referred to in the security industry as the “Seven Point Plan” — much of which has been adopted elsewhere as standard to counter the latest variations in terrorist threats.
One of the key improvements was the development of a 100-percent checked baggage screening system. The implementation of the system in Glasgow in 1993 was something of a landmark. It enabled 100-percent screening and proved itself operationally efficient with zero impact on the movement of passengers or baggage.
Baggage screening is obvious feature of air travel today. It is also, when coupled with the other security procedures of which passengers are unaware, extremely expensive. Furthermore, it carries with it its own set of challenges. According to an airport designer, GD (name withheld for security reasons), retrofitting some of the more impressive equipment is “almost impossible because of the sheer size of the equipment and the support infrastructure needed to operate it.” It is, says D, much easier to incorporate security into the design of an airport at the early planning stages. “A security master-plan is essential,” he told Arab News. “Security issues are much wider than just preventing unwanted objects getting on to airplanes.”
Planning for security starts beyond the airport perimeter, D says. Modern anti-aircraft weaponry — highly portable, powerful and easily concealable — is always a threat. “Outside security services are primed to deal with that, but it is part of the security mix,” he explains. It involves engaging the full range of anti-terrorism operations at national level and although external policing is not specifically an air travel responsibility, it is part of the general procedure.
“The effectiveness of security relies on integration,” says D. “That applies to the cross-flow of information between security and booking agencies, profiling of passengers and the like before they ever get to the airport as much as the physical challenges of baggage inspection.”
Priority security is directed at public access points — car parks and ground transport areas; check-in and baggage reclaim halls; flight crew and apron staff access points; aircraft-servicing vehicles; and personnel and flight-path approaches.
Historically, most attacks in the aviation industry have been aimed at bringing aircraft down rather than on ground infrastructure. There are much easier domestic targets than a secured airport — although the June 2007 suicide bomb attack using a car in a public access area on, ironically, Glasgow airport gave the lie that airport buildings are immune from attack.
This emphasizes the point that it is not only passengers that need to be scrutinized. Cargo delivery areas and railway stations, frequently right to the heart of airports, must be as well. As it is, passengers are coming under increasingly close scrutiny as new security systems develop and, rightly or wrongly, it becomes more able to access personal details and information about individual members of the traveling public. Again the key word is ‘integration’. As the public interact increasingly with computers and the Internet, so the security services have access to larger amounts of detailed information about people. Like it or not, Big Brother has been here for years. The critical question is what is done with the information and how secure it is.
Computer Automated Passenger Screening (CAPS) was probably first developed by US-based Northwest Airlines. The process uses information from readily accessible computerized databases that are already available to airlines (for example credit card companies) to separate passengers into two security-risk categories: a large low-risk group (98 percent) and a small high-risk group. “Chances are that somebody using a false ID and planning to inflict harm on an aircraft is not going to appear to an automated profiling system in the same way that a business traveler or a tourist would,” said Jesse Beauchamp, Ferkel professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Beauchamp served on two US federal commissions in the 1990s investigating air safety.
“We now know that some of the Sept. 11 hijackers had previously been under surveillance and that some had been identified as having connections with known terrorist organizations,” he said in an interview published in the Caltech News in 2001. “If the profiling system had been in place and if that intelligence had been available to the people who checked these individuals in, I think the airlines would have been alerted along the way to at least part of what was happening.”
According to the International Air Transportation Association (IATA), international passenger airline traffic in 2007 increased 7.4 percent on 2006, itself a 5.9 percent rise on the previous year. But “Self Loading Freight” (as airlines so wittily call their paying passengers) is only part of the security challenge; commercial freight is another — and freight traffic increased 4.3 percent in 2007 and 4.5 percent in 2008.
Given the potential for increased revenue generation, security requirements for both passenger and freight traffic will have to increase. The target is too big to ignore.
Eight years on, CAPS is rapidly becoming the industry standard. New legislation proposed in the UK requires that, in addition to information accessible without passengers’ knowledge, up to 90 further elements of information be given by transporters to the government authorities for any travel from outside the UK mainland; apparently it even applies to cross channel swimmers and passengers on the Isle of Wight ferry! Failure to do so can incur immense fines and possible imprisonment.
There is no doubt that good security, intrusive or not, is needed for safe travel. However as the saying goes, rules are for the guidance of the wise and the obedience of fools. The Los Angeles Times reported an incident that occurred in January. It is a classic example of the need for sensible implementation of security procedures.
Tamera Jo Freeman was on a Frontier Airlines flight to Denver in 2007 when her two children began to quarrel over the window shade and then spilled tomato juice into her lap.
She spanked each of them on the thigh with three swats. It was a small incident, but one that in the heightened anxiety after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks would eventually have enormous ramifications for her and her children.
A flight attendant confronted Freeman, who responded by hurling a few profanities and throwing what remained of a can of tomato juice on the floor.
The incident aboard the Frontier flight ultimately led to Freeman’s arrest and conviction for a federal felony defined as an act of terrorism under the Patriot Act, the controversial federal law enacted after the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.
“I had no idea I was breaking the law,” said Freeman, 40, who spent a remarkable three months in jail before pleading guilty.
Freeman is one of at least 200 people on flights who have been convicted under the amended law. In most cases, there was no evidence that the passengers had attempted to hijack the airplane or physically attack any of the flight crew.
“Given the amount of security procedures that surround the flight of an aircraft,” opines Dowling. “It’s something of a wonder they ever get off the ground.”
But they do; and in the main, safely.
So next time you are delayed by seemingly unnecessary security procedures, you might remember the words of a hugely experienced consultant in airport and flight security for a major British airline who Arab News asked to sum up security for the traveling public.
“One bag missing from an aircraft is not a problem,” he said. “It’s when we have one too many for the number of passengers that we go into overdrive.”
Or in a word: Lockerbie.
