Cockpit Confidential (30 page)

That is, if governments cooperate. IATA is making sense, but I'm afraid it lacks the clout of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the federal branch under whose auspices TSA operates. Enacting serious change would take, more than anything else, the political will and courage of our leaders in Congress. We have thus far seen little political opposition, bipartisan or otherwise, to TSA's squandering of our time and money. While I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, our leaders talk and act as if they enjoy the status quo, unwilling to disenfranchise any facet of what has become a vast and profitable security-industrial complex.

To be fair, there are plenty of bright and resourceful people at the TSA who know a lot more about the challenges of airport security than I ever will. And they openly admit that a philosophical change is needed—a shift toward focusing on passengers themselves rather than on their belongings. This, they understand, is the only viable strategy for the future. But TSA is, in the end, a bureaucracy. No doubt it sees the IATA proposal, and others like it, as a threat to its funding and authority. This was an agency created in haste and granted considerable powers and relatively little accountability. Any idea, however beneficial, faces an uphill battle against such a potent government entity, especially when aided and abetted by a lethargic populace and an irresponsible media.

What TSA has signed off on are third-party programs, run by outside contractors, in which passengers submit biometric and personal data in exchange for expedited screening—for a fee. Count me among those who find these programs objectionable. Rather than fixing the problem, citizens can pay money and cut to the front of the line. Your taxes will continue to support a dysfunctional system, and now you can pay even more to circumvent that system. This is progress?

It doesn't have to be this way. The solution is out there. Give us good intelligence-gathering and law enforcement, together with on-site random searches, thorough explosives scanning, and smartly managed profiling, and what have we got? A security strategy that is, frankly, pretty good.

As good as it can be, anyway. Somewhere beneath all of this rests the uncomfortable, seldom-acknowledged fact that no matter how hard we try, we're never going to make flying completely safe. Neither all the determination in the world nor the most sweeping regulations we dare codify will outsmart a cunning enough saboteur. Sound, competent security greatly improves our chances, whether against the concoctions of a single deranged individual or organized terror from the caves of Central Asia. But with every new technology and pledge of better safeguards, we correspondingly inspire the imaginations of those who wish to defeat us. There will always be a way to skirt the system.

This brings us to a third fundamental flaw in our approach, whereby we refuse to acknowledged that the
real
job of keeping terrorists away from planes is not the job of airport screeners in the first place. Rather, it's the job of government agencies and law enforcement. The grunt work of hunting down terrorists takes place far offstage, relying on the diligent work of cops, spies, and intelligence officers. Air crimes need to be stopped in the planning stages. By the time a terrorist gets to the airport, chances are it's too late. And the rage of angry radicals, dangerous as it may be, is a long-term anthropological mission to be dealt with separately; it is not an excuse to turn airports into fortresses and subvert freedoms.

In the end, I'm not sure which is more distressing, the inanity of the existing regulations or the average citizen's acceptance of them. There ought to be a tide of opposition rising up against this mania. Where is it? At its loudest, the voice of the traveling public is one of grumbly resignation. The op-ed pages are silent; the pundits have nothing to say.

The airlines, for their part, are in something of a bind. That carriers and industry advocates seem content with such high levels of aggravation among their customers suggests a business model that is almost surreally masochistic and self-destructive. On the other hand, imagine the outrage in certain circles should airlines be caught lobbying for what is perceived to be a dangerous abrogation of security and responsibility—even if it's not. Carriers caught plenty of flak, almost all of it unfair, in the aftermath of September 11. Understandably, they no longer want that liability.

How we got to this point is an interesting study in reactionary politics, fear mongering, and a disconcerting willingness of the public to accept almost anything, no matter how illogical, inconvenient, or unreasonable, in the name of security. Conned and frightened, what we get is not actual security, but security spectacle. The idea that this spectacle “helps travelers to feel better” is about its only excuse and is hardly enough justification to keep it funded and running. And although a high percentage of passengers, along with most security experts, would concur that it leaves us no safer, and perhaps even increases our risks, there has been little to no protest. In that regard, maybe, we've gotten exactly the system we deserve.

In Perspective:
The Golden Age of Air Crimes

 

1970:
A Pan Am 747 bound for New York is skyjacked after takeoff from Amsterdam. The flight is diverted to Cairo, where all of the 170 occupants are released. Radicals then blow up the plane.

1970:
In what were known as the Black September hijackings, five jets, including planes belonging to TWA, Pan Am, and Israel's El Al, are commandeered over Europe during a three-day span by a group called the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). After all passengers are freed, three of the five planes are diverted to a remote airstrip in Jordan, rigged with explosives, and blown up. A fourth is flown to Egypt and destroyed there.

1971:
A man using the name D. B. Cooper skyjacks and threatens to blow up a Northwest Orient 727 flying from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle. Over southwestern Washington, he parachutes out the back of the plane with a hefty ransom and is never seen or heard from again.

1972:
A JAT (Yugoslav Airlines) DC-9 en route from Copenhagen to Zagreb explodes at 33,000 feet. The Ustashe, aka Croatian National Movement, admits to the bombing.

1972:
Explosion aboard a Cathay Pacific jet flying from Bangkok to Hong Kong kills eighty-one people. A Thai police lieutenant is accused of hiding the bomb to murder his fiancée.

1972:
In the arrivals lounge of Lod Airport near Tel Aviv, three men from the Japanese Red Army, recruited by the Palestinian PLFP, open fire with machine guns and grenades, killing twenty-six people and injuring eighty.

1973:
As passengers board a Pan Am 747 at the airport in Rome, terrorists spray the plane with gunfire and toss grenades into the cabin, killing thirty.

1973:
Eighty-one perish as an Aeroflot jet explodes over Siberia during an attempted skyjacking.

1974:
A TWA 707 flying from Athens to Rome falls into the sea near Greece, the result of an explosive device hidden in a cargo compartment.

1974:
A man detonates two grenades aboard an Air Vietnam 727 when the crew refuses to fly him to Hanoi.

1976:
A Cubana DC-8 crashes near Barbados, killing seventy-three. An anti-Castro exile and three alleged accomplices are put on trial but acquitted for lack of evidence.

1976:
Air France Flight 139, bound from Tel Aviv to Athens to Paris, is hijacked by a combined force of PFLP and Revolutionäre Zellen (RZ). The plane is diverted first to Benghazi, Libya, before continuing to Entebbe, Uganda. At Entebbe, 105 hostages are held until the plane is raided by commandos from the Israel Defense Forces. During the raid, three passengers, seven hijackers, one Israeli, and approximately forty Ugandan soldiers are killed. (The dead Israeli, Yonatan Netanyahu, was the younger brother of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.)

1977:
Both pilots of a Malaysian Airline System (today called Malaysia Airlines) 737 are shot by a skyjacker. The plane crashes into a swamp.

1985:
The Abu Nidal group kills twenty people in a pair of coordinated ticket-counter assaults at airports in Vienna and Rome.

1985:
Shiite militiamen hijack TWA Flight 847 from Athens to Rome, holding hostages for two weeks. The sole casualty is a U.S. Navy diver, who is shot and dumped on the tarmac. All remaining hostages are eventually released, but not before the Israeli government agrees to free more than seven hundred Shiite prisoners.

1985:
An Air India 747 on a service between Toronto and Bombay is bombed over the North Atlantic by Sikh militants. The 329 fatalities remain history's worst single-plane act of terrorism. A second bomb, intended for another Air India 747, detonates prematurely in Tokyo before being loaded (
see ten worst crashes
).

1986:
As TWA flight 840 descends through 10,000 feet toward Athens, a bomb goes off in the cabin. Four people are ejected through a tear in the 727's fuselage.

1986:
At the airport in Karachi, Pakistan, a Pan Am 747 is preparing for departure when four heavily armed members of the Abu Nidal group seize the aircraft. When Pakistani forces storm the plane, the terrorists begin shooting and lobbing grenades. Twenty-two passengers are killed and 150 wounded. Although all four terrorists were captured and sent to prison in Pakistan, they were released in 2001.

1987:
A Korean Air Lines 707 disappears over the Andaman Sea en route from Baghdad to Seoul. One of two Koreans suspected of hiding a bomb commits suicide before he's arrested. His accomplice, a young woman, confesses to leaving the device—fashioned from both plastic and liquid explosives—in an overhead rack before disembarking during an intermediate stop. Condemned to death, the woman is pardoned in 1990 by the president of South Korea.

1987:
At Los Angeles International Airport, a recently fired ticket agent, David Burke, sneaks a loaded gun past security and boards a Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) jet on its way to San Francisco. During cruise, he breaks into the cockpit, shoots both pilots, then noses the airplane into the ground near Harmony, California, killing all forty-four on board. (Unbelievable as it might sound, the government's response to this crime was to implement checkpoint security screening not for ground personnel, but instead for pilots and flight attendants.)

1988:
Pan Am flight 103 is carrying 259 people when it is destroyed by a bomb blast over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland. One of the most intensive criminal investigations in history brings two Libyan operatives, al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah and Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi, to trial in the Netherlands. Fhimah is acquitted. Al-Megrahi is found guilty and sentenced to life but is released by the British government in 2009. Until you-know-what, the bombing of flight 103 represents the worst-ever terrorist attack against a civilian U.S. target (
see ten worst crashes
).

1989:
Libya will also be held responsible for the bombing of UTA flight 772 nine months after Lockerbie. Most Americans don't remember this incident, but it has never been forgotten in France. A hundred and seventy people from seventeen countries were killed when an explosive device went off in the forward luggage hold of the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 on a flight from Brazzaville, Congo, to Paris. The wreckage fell into the Tenere region of the Sahara, in northern Niger, one of the planet's most remote areas. A French court eventually convicted six Libyans in absentia for the murders, including Muammar Gaddafi's brother-in-law.

1989:
In a plot to kill police informants, members of a cocaine cartel blow up Avianca Flight 203 bound from Bogotá to Cali. There are no survivors among 110 crew and passengers.

1990:
A young man claiming to have explosives strapped to his body forces his way into the cockpit of a Xiamen Airlines 737 and demands to be flown to Taiwan. Running out of fuel, the crew attempts a landing at Canton (Guangzhou), when a struggle erupts. The plane veers off the runway and collides with two other aircraft.

1994:
Riding along as an auxiliary crewmember, Auburn Calloway, an off-duty Federal Express pilot scheduled for termination, attacks the three-man crew of a DC-10 with a spear gun and a hammer, nearly killing all of them. His plan, before he's finally overtaken by the battered and bloodied pilots, is to crash the airliner into FedEx's Memphis headquarters.

1994:
An Air France A300 is stormed by a foursome of extremist Muslims in Algeria. The plane is forced to Marseilles where seven people die when French troops rush aboard for a rescue. News footage shows an Air France pilot hurling himself out of a cockpit window while a stun grenade flashes behind him.

1996:
An Ethiopian Airlines 767 is hijacked over the Indian Ocean. The jet runs out of fuel and heads for a ditching off the Comoros Islands. Hijackers wrestle with the pilots, and the plane breaks apart upon hitting the water, killing 125.

1999:
An All Nippon Airways 747 lands safely after a deranged man forces his way onto the flight deck and stabs the captain to death with an eight-inch knife.

1999:
Air Botswana captain Chris Phatswe steals an empty ATR commuter plane and slams it into two parked aircraft, killing himself and destroying virtually the entire fleet of his nation's tiny airline.

 

And not to forget what might have been, I'll remind you again of the near success of the 1994 Project Bojinka conspiracy to bomb eleven widebody jets simultaneously over the Pacific. Bojinka, or “big bang,” was the brainchild of Ramzi Yousef, a master mixer of liquid explosives, and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The latter would go on to mastermind the September 11 attacks, while Yousef was, at the time, already a wanted man for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center prelude. The bombs, made from nitroglycerin, sulfuric acid, acetone, and other chemicals, would be hidden with the under-seat life jackets. In 1995, Yousef completed a successful, small-level test run on a Philippine Airlines 747, killing a Japanese businessman. The plot was broken up after authorities investigated a chemical fire in the Manila apartment of one of Yousef's accomplices.