posted on September 15, 2001 08:01:38 PM new
I have heard lots of speculation on the future of air travel, and wanted to ask the opinions of the people here - which of the many security measures proposed do they support?
Higher flight costs is almost a certainty, as they research and purchase state of the art security systems - and staff these systems.
Long delays through customs. Background checks on passengers. Bullet proof metal doors seperating the flight deck from the rest of the plane. Video survelliance on the planes.
Are these measures feasible, enough, or not enough?
Given a free ticket anywhere in the world - would you fly tomorrow?
The one suggestion that surprises me most is the introduction of armed guards on the planes. In the crowded, cramped conditions of an airplane, with all the seats and sections as dividers, how would an armed guard hit his target?
And, what would happen when a bullet pierced the shell of the plane? (Would it go through the outer plane, causing decompression?)
Airlines are predicting huge losses as their expenses increase, and their income declines as people are scared to fly.
How much more money are people willing to pay, to ensure that they fly safer?
posted on September 15, 2001 08:17:37 PM new
Even if passenger numbers get back to "normal" there is no way the infrastructure can handle the slow downs.
You may remember a few short months ago there were complaints and investigations here in the US about flight delays. A huge percentage of flights were delayed on a dailey basis.
We didn't have the capacity to handle the slip shod security we used to have.
The system is just going to be a mess, pure and simple. In many instances, for shorter flights, it will simply be quicker to drive than fly.
posted on September 15, 2001 08:32:30 PM new
When we flew on THY, the Turkish airline, our luggage and carryon stuff went through a metal detector as we entered the airport. Then we were led to an area where we were each frisked-it was the first time I ever "assumed the position". THEN we were allowed to check in.
In the airport, armed(with Uzis) guards patrolled. People without boarding passes were not allowed beyond the gates, which had another metal detector.
Before we could get on the plane, we had to identify our baggage, which was lined up along the runway. Any baggage not identified was taken to the end of the runway and blown up(the blowing up part happened after we took off).
Extreme? Well, how often do you hear of problems on Turkish planes?
The most dangerous part of the flight was fighting for a seat with an elderly Turkish woman who was determined to sit next to the window...
posted on September 15, 2001 08:43:24 PM new
I've heard various reports since the airports re-opened, that people 'tested' the security levels, and it failed.
Some news stations also said that there were 8 people arrested - four of them already seated on the plane, one with false pilot ID.
Some stations are saying this was a false report, others are still running it, with no retraction. I don't know which news station is most reliable - can someone tell me what the reliable ones are saying?
posted on September 15, 2001 08:56:49 PM new
They Havent really Corrected the security problem that exist at this time.
mainly some of the things they have put in place were like many say knee jerk reaction it will cost alot to fix the problem, the US is many times larger then some of the smaller countries less air ports and far less air trafic. http://www.Dman-N-Company.com
Email [email protected]
posted on September 15, 2001 08:58:50 PM newDman: We've flown out of the biggest airports in Europe and all-ALL-of them have better security than any airport in the US.
posted on September 15, 2001 09:04:24 PM new
I'm very sure of that , My point is that the changes they have made hasn't scratched the surfice of what needs to be done.
posted on September 15, 2001 09:12:32 PM new
To be honest I have never been in the air on a plane ever
not really sure how they could make it safer but i'm pretty sure no one would feel safer with armed security on a plane..
I do know Security cost money like anything else and it wasn't fixed nearly over night with a two day shut down..
maybe they need to make the cockpit of planes a bank type vault with timed locks no matter who or whats on board you can't get in or change the planes direction. http://www.Dman-N-Company.com
Email [email protected]
posted on September 15, 2001 09:14:23 PM new
If you punch a few small holes in a plane with a gun it will take a number of minutes for the pressure in a volume as large as a plane to bleed down. The pilot will have plenty of time to put on their oxygen mask etc.
However the windows are a problem. If a shot can shatter a whole window and blow it out you will have a very quick decomprssion.
It is possible to form bullets out of a powdered metal that will not blow a window out but is decastating on flesh. Or you can use guns that shoot shot instead of bullets. It may be important to supply armed guards with a oxygen mask that can be put on fast and has good enough vision to allow him to shoot.
Almost any kind of an action to take over a plane requires the jacker to stand up and make a target of himself.
posted on September 15, 2001 09:19:36 PM new
Gravid,
Thanks for the information on armed guards on the flights - that was really bothering me - I figured the flight would go down due to decompression if shots were fired.
I read an article earlier tonight about some of the amazing weapons the United States now have - get this, from the New of the World (don't know how to make this link clickable): http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/4321512
"But by far the largest piece of new kit is the airborne laser — a killer beam fired from a modified Boeing 747 jumbo jet.
The laser carries a massive two megawatts of energy — enough to power several small towns — but is so accurate it can pick out and destroy an individual in a crowd 180 miles away without harming people around him. "
I wonder if there are not already agents in Afghanistan, with these weapons, hunting Bin Laden down.
posted on September 15, 2001 09:27:58 PM new
I believe that the Sky Marshalls carried redesigned guns with lower muzzle velocity; the bullets wouldn't penetrate the fuselage.
One consideration is redesigning the transponders. Like, make them impossible to turn off.
Another is the people. At the top: They guy in charge of security at Logan was apparently the ex-governor's driver. He was an experienced state trooper, but had no specific training, education, or background even on facilities security. At the bottom: the folks doing frontline security, e.g. looking at the baggage xrays... minimum wage doesn't exactly attract a motivated workforce, as indicated by the turnover rates.
-gaffan- [email protected]
posted on September 15, 2001 09:31:10 PM new
I believe the minimum wage jobs have to go. Raise the pay, and you'll get people who stay at the job longer - therefore justifying more training, and becoming more experienced.
posted on September 15, 2001 09:32:02 PM new
We had "sky marshalls" on planes in the 70s when plane old hijacking and hostage taking was the vogue. I guess that was the good old days.
It is my understanding that these marshalls will have the ability to disable people without a gun and the tools to do it.
posted on September 15, 2001 09:49:10 PM new
Airport interrogations, armed air marshals and a sophisticated security net used by Israel's El Al airline would probably have foiled this week's devastating terror attacks in the United States, Israeli experts said.
Faced with El Al's stringent security procedures, experts say it is unlikely the 18-odd hijackers would have been able to board one, let alone four planes. Even if they had, an armed El Al marshal would have been on hand to disarm them, they said.
The cells of four or five attackers armed with knives could never have taken over the controls on an El Al plane as the pilots are locked in a reinforced cabin.
The U.S. attacks were so devastating because the hijackers were able to fly the planes into New York's World Trade Center on Tuesday killing thousands of people and another plane flew into the Pentagon in Washington shortly afterwards killing scores more.
Passengers travelling on Israel's national carrier El Al are required to respond to a stream of questions fired by security staff before they can board the plane. Pauses, hesitations and inconsistencies in stories are scrutinized.
"Who packed your bags? Have they been with you the entire time? Has anyone given you a gift to deliver?" are some of the queries asked of passengers before flight check-in. Security staff rummage through suitcases and hand luggage.
"This looking into the eyes of the person, you see whether he is anxious, worried, concerned or he is an innocent passenger," former Israeli intelligence chief Shlomo Gazit said.
He said the hijackers behind Tuesday's attacks would have shown signs of anxiety or stress before they boarded the plane.
"I don't believe you can send 30 fanatics to the airport and they will not show in their eyes that they have something in mind," he said.
Gazit acknowledged that it would be difficult to apply the same stringency to the huge number of internal and international flights in the United States.
Security was "far more complicated" there, he said. "You are not dealing with a limited number of flights. In the States they probably have 100,000 flights a day from dozens of international airports."
El Al fine-tuned its security procedures, which cost some $90 million a year, when Israel was faced with a hijacking campaign by the Palestine Liberation Organization and other militant groups in the late 1960s and 1970s.
El Al security agents know about every passenger on each flight even before they arrive at the check-in counters, as names are cross-referenced with lists of suspects prepared by Interpol and Israeli intelligence agencies, said Defense Ministry spokesman Shlomo Dror, a former El Al security official.
"When the passenger comes to the flight it's not the first time we know something about him," Dror said.
Dror would not reveal the profile of possible suspects used by El Al security guards, but he said security officers did not just focus on people of Arab origin.
During Dror's time with El Al security, a German man in his early 20s was caught in Zurich in 1979. He thought he was smuggling diamonds to the Jewish state on behalf of a criminal gang but the package he had been given was actually a bomb.
In 1986, a pregnant Irish woman was caught by El Al security guards in London trying to board a plane to Israel. Her Palestinian boyfriend had given her a 1.5 kilogram bomb which he had told her was a gift for his family.
"You find the people who can be the threat and when you locate this person they must go through a very thorough security check to make sure they don't have any weapons or ammunition or a bomb," Dror said.
"Security is a system that has a series of circles. If one of the circles collapses you still have other circles to stop the terrorist," said Dror.
El Al's does not comment on airline security as a matter of policy. "We do a lot of things but we don't talk about it," one official said.
The airline, which is expected to make a loss of around $160 million this year, covers about 30 percent of the security expenses. The Israeli government funds the rest.
"There is no hundred percent in security but at least you can make it very hard for the terrorists," said Dror. "In most cases they are looking for easy targets."
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We let our guard down in America, that's obvious. However it's probably impossible to implement here the security procedures of one airline based in a country with just one international airport. Also, there is much more to be concerned about security-wise than just airplane hijackings.
posted on September 15, 2001 09:49:25 PM new
I absolutely dread to see what is going to happen to the major carriers when the stock exchange opens monday. It will be disasterous.
The federal government will have to subsidize the carriers for a long time I fear.
posted on September 15, 2001 09:54:04 PM new
Should We Pay
Security's Price? by Zev Chafetz
El-Al is Israel's national airline. It has an exceptional record of safety and security, and many experts are offering it as a model for American airlines.
I'm not sure it will do much good.
El-Al-class security is usually described in terms of its technique. Passengers must arrive three hours before the flight. They are subjected to intense questioning, sometimes by more than one security agent. If there is something suspicious about them, they are taken off to the side and questioned some more, and searched. If they still don't satisfy the concerns of the security people, they don't get on the plane.
That's why no one has hijacked an El-Al flight in more than 30 years.
Americans who want an El-Al level of security will pay a price in convenience, obviously. But they also will have to accept profiling.
El-Al's approach to security is based on a very cold-eyed realism. It begins with the assumption that Israel has enemies who are perfectly willing to murder civilian passengers. It asks who these enemies are, and who their recruits are most likely to be. The answers to these questions provide El-Al with a rational means of sorting out dangerous passengers.
El-Al-class security assumes that Israeli Jews are least likely to try to capture or blow up an Israeli plane. They get put in a special security line and examined in a serious but not overly intrusive way.
Foreigners get classified by age, sex, nationality and religion. Jews are normally treated with less suspicion than non-Jews (and there is a whole series of questions aimed at determining whether a passenger is Jewish without actually coming out and asking). Single women traveling alone set off alarms; in the past, some women have been used by terrorist boyfriends as unsuspecting mules for explosives. Arabs, including Israeli Arabs, get a very aggressive and thorough check. As a result, Arabs with a choice usually avoid El-Al.
This sort of prioritization is not inherently racist; it is pragmatic and reality-based. If El-Al were to conclude that Arabs were no more likely than Israeli Jews to kidnap an Israeli plane, everybody would go in the same line. But in the real world, that simply isn't the case, and nobody feels constrained by political correctness to pretend otherwise.
If America wants to achieve El-Al security, it will have to adopt this approach. Men will get checked differently than women, young men differently than old men. Foreigners will come in for special attention, and citizens who look foreign will sometimes be tossed in the mix. In the war against Islamic terror, Arabs and Muslims will be especially suspect.
All this might be worth doing if it would ensure total safety.
But it won't. Israel has one international airport; America has hundreds (and thousands of smaller facilities). Turning them into fortresses is an exercise in futility. Make JFK inaccessible, and a terrorist will get on the train and head for Grand Central. Or hop a bus for the Port Authority bus terminal. Or park a car bomb next to your neighborhood school.
There is only one way to stop Islamic terror, and that is by destroying the regimes that sponsor it. Some of them, like Iraq and Iran, are on the verge of getting their hands on nuclear weapons. If they aren't stopped, hijackers will be the least of America's problems, and security at JFK and LaGuardia will matter about as much as the metal detector at the World Trade Center.
posted on September 15, 2001 10:00:32 PM new
Well, while everyone is scrambling trying to find a secure way to safeguard flights, I wonder where the next attack will come from. A bus? Train? Ship?
posted on September 15, 2001 10:20:35 PM new
Or a 55 gallon drum of anthrax in the resevoir. Shaking up airline security is a good thing, but it's fighting the last war. But it's unlikely the next attack will be something that nobody's thought of. (Hell, I've been thinking about this one since seeing Escape From New York when it came out twenty years ago.) There are doubtless half a hundred folks with counter-terrorism credentials who've been trying to elevate awareness of a broad variety of vulnerabilities for years. It's a question of whether, even in the wake of Tuesday, they'll be listened to. Or instead dismissed as worrying about far-fetched scenarios. And whether we'll cough up the bucks to deal with it.
-gaffan- [email protected]
posted on September 15, 2001 10:28:46 PM new
Gaffan said, in regards to airline security:
"And whether we'll cough up the bucks to deal with it."
That is exactly my fear. Without raising the prices of tickets, you cannot get the security. Without the security......
As less people can afford to fly due to the higher prices, the cost of tickets for the few that can afford it, will rise.
The only way I can see the airlines making it, is with government intervention - the government would have to take over responsibility for security in airports and on airplanes, and tax their people for the costs.
