Airline safety Technology

Airline safety
Technology, consistency necessary to defeat motivated terrorists

Dec. 29, 2001

"Most airline passengers are not checked for explosives before boarding planes."

That was the beginning of an Associated Press story about an airline passenger who attempted to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his footwear. The story went on to quote an official of the Air Line Pilots Association: "It’s a hole that needs to be looked at."

Yes, it is, and it’s a hole that the American people thought was being looked at, and plugged, right up to the time they heard about that man, who managed to board a flight with explosives on his person, even though he’d missed the same flight the day before because he was detained for questioning. The Federal Aviation Administration had warned earlier this month that hijackers might hide weapons in their shoes, but apparently the idea of exploding shoes didn’t occur to anyone in authority until it was almost too late.

Passengers, logically, have believed that airlines and the FAA had some plan to ensure their safety. We’re not naive; we know that no security system is impermeable. Our safety can never be fully guaranteed, but we believed that reasonable attention was being given it as part of the price of our tickets. Now we’re beginning to suspect that’s not true.

Airlines have a congressionally mandated deadline of Jan. 18 for having a system in place to inspect all checked baggage for explosives, but no walk-through scanner exists to check passengers for similar contraband, which does not set off metal detectors. Airline officials say the only way to spot such explosives is to use profiling to identify the passengers most likely to be carrying them and then subject those passengers to a thorough search. Another option — searching each passenger — is unwieldy and also not foolproof, but it’s hardly beyond consideration. We’d like to believe federal officials at least looked seriously at such measures before decreeing that very little could be done to protect us from this sort of terrorism.

The lack of well-developed technology is a significant problem but hardly an excuse for not looking very seriously at the possibility that terrorists, knowing their luggage was being carefully examined, would look for another route to smuggle weapons onto the plane. Nor was it sensible to believe that a terrorist wouldn’t hide an explosive on his body. It’s only been 100 days since several terrorists on each of four separate flights were perfectly willing to die for their cause. In terms of consequences to the passengers, ramming a plane into a building is not much different from exploding one in the air.

The eventual solution, though, must be technological in nature. Repetitive tasks are mind-numbing, and the odds of picking one terrorist out of thousands of passengers are poor. We can’t expect poorly paid human screeners to outwit highly motivated terrorists who have access to better technology.

The solution must also be federal in nature. This is neither the time nor the place for privatization. Screening procedures must be consistent throughout the air-travel system, and as rigorous in such small feeder airports as Durango and Cortez as they are at DIA, Dulles, O’Hare and LaGuardia. We cannot afford weak links.

Now we’ve plugged the hole that allowed exploding shoes; the next threat will be a different one. Let’s hope that airline and administration officials are one step ahead, rather than caught flat-footed again.