Why do terror groups target aviation? This is an important question. Al-Qaeda’s success in turning commercial aircraft into missiles marked the end of an age of innocence in air travel.
Most other targets are static. An assault on a hotel or public transport can cause mayhem and terror – witness the 7/7 attacks on the tube and a bus in London, or the Mumbai attacks of November 2008.
But an aircraft in flight can be turned into a missile, threatening not only the passengers onboard. It is both a potent weapon and a symbol – a response, in the minds of some, to the cruise missiles and long-range bombers the US fires from afar at its enemies. It constitutes what, in intelligence circles, is termed ‘blowback’.
We should acknowledge that there has been no successful attack on the US since 2001, and that no aircraft flying to or from the UK, continental Europe or the US has been brought down by a bomb or turned into a missile – and this is not for want of groups and individuals trying.
Breaching airport security has become iconic. It is a declaration that ‘the war’ is not over, and the authorities are in an arms race with those wishing to do it. Both sides operate in the knowledge that, as the Provisional IRA put it after a bomb attack on a Brighton hotel in 1984 that almost killed Margaret Thatcher: “Remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”
The Twin Towers attack was carried out using razor blades and sticky tape, remember. The failed liquid bomb plot turned hair dye into bomb-making equipment. The shoe bomber planned to punch a hole in an aircraft with a pair of trainers.
Iata says aviation security has “come at a great price in passenger convenience and industry costs”. In the words of director general Tony Tyler: “We spend a huge amount on screening people who do not need it. . . We are putting customers through an immensely complicated and, most of the time, unnecessary hassle and airports are creaking at the seams.”
So there is a move towards ‘trusted traveller programmes’ which use travel records and frequent flyer details to identify ‘low-risk’ passengers. This sounds sensible, but there are problems with it. One is the issue of profiling, which experience suggests too often degenerates into racial (i.e. racist) profiling.
Another is that it can be flouted by groups deploying bombers or hijackers who show ‘normal’ travel patterns or have fake identities, who are unknown to the authorities or who otherwise defy the expectations of staff trained to spot them.
A leading industry figure told Travel Weekly this week: “It’s time for some standardisation. Security measures are often inconsistent.”
It’s a fair point. However, as BAA’s Ian Hutcheson pointed out in a piece in The Guardian: “It is clear the terrorist is not deterred from planning and carrying out these types of attack. This is partly due to the fact that some of the things we do are predictable.”
A proportion of airport staff now undergo training in behavioural detection techniques designed to identify passengers who behave suspiciously. Yet consider, would someone engaged in a bomb plot be more or less likely to behave oddly, to display signs of stress, in the knowledge that they need to negotiate a range of detection points, scans and searches which they have no chance of avoiding?
It is in this context that their behaviour might appear ‘strange’ or that a verbal exchange at check-in or elsewhere might throw up an anomaly. Remove the sources of stress and there may be less to be nervous about.
This goes some way to address the complaint about inconsistency. There are inconsistencies due to a failure to generalise, or even to agree on, procedures. There are inconsistencies due to slack practice. However some of the unpredictability, such as whether passengers are requested to remove shoes, is deliberate.
Ask a proportion of passengers to take off their shoes and everyone will think they may be asked to do the same. This avoids the greater hassle and delay of asking everyone to do it. The secure alternative would be to require everyone to do it. The inconsistency is for a reason.
Airport security is a pain. But as the head of the US Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, told a World Travel and Tourism Council summit earlier this year: “It only takes one plane to go down . . . The public will take fewer flights if they feel it is not safe.”