Airline Security

So, flying on about 30 odd flights in the next 3.5 months, this really struck home to me. I hate flying for the simple reason of going through the metal detectors and such when you are at the airport. If you are anything like me (or not) check out this article on Salon.com (which, by the way, is a phenomenal website) about airport security. Very interesting.

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Conventional wisdom says the terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling aboard box cutters. This is bollocks. What they exploited was a weakness in our mind-set — a set of presumptions based on a decades-long track record of hijackings. In the past, a takeover meant hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were trained in the concept of “passive resistance.” All of that changed forever when American Airlines Flight 11 collided with the north tower of the World Trade Center. What weapons the 19 men had in hand mattered little; the success of the attacks relied fundamentally on the element of surprise. And in this respect, their scheme was all but guaranteed not to fail.

In 2006, for several reasons — from hardened cockpit doors to, especially, the awareness of passengers — just the opposite is true. “Any hijacker will face a planeload of angry and frightened passengers,” says Ross Johnson, a former Canadian intelligence officer and aviation security consultant. “And he will be badly injured or killed by the mob. That introduces significant doubt into his plan.” Say what you want of terrorists, but they cannot afford to waste time and resources on schemes with a high probability of failure.

We, by comparison, are more than happy to waste billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that, in some sense, has already happened. No matter that a deadly sharp object can be fashioned from almost anything found on a plane — from a wine bottle to a piece of plastic moulding — we are nonetheless asked to queue for absurd lengths of time, subject to embarrassing pat-downs and confiscation of our belongings, lest anybody make it onto an aircraft with a pair of pointy scissors or a screwdriver.

With respect to the newly introduced rules banning liquids and gels, the folly is much the same. Regardless of how many hobby knives and shampoo bottles we confiscate at the X-ray machine, there will remain an unlimited number of ways to smuggle items onto a plane. We are not fighting materials per se, we are fighting the imagination and cleverness of the would-be saboteur who would make them dangerous. These people are the target.