Fear of Flying

TO PARAPHRASE Woody Allen, I’m not scared of flying, I’m scared of being hijacked or blown up in mid air and plummeting to earth with various limbs being ripped from my body as a result of Britain’s rubbish airport security.
After pissing off passengers and costing airlines millions of pounds in lost revenue for the last three months, the government is today relaxing the tightened security it introduced in August. This, you will recall, followed the uncovering of a “terrorist plot” of almost Biblical proportions in which a gang of extremists allegedly planned to blow up 10 planes killing more than 3,000 passengers. That’s the same “terrorist plot” which saw two suspects walk free from court last week because of “insufficient evidence.” A “terrorist plot” remarkably similar to the last “terrorist plot” that failed to result in any convictions - you remember, the one where the tanks were wheeled out at Heathrow as a fist-pumping declaration of our intent in the “war on terror”.
So it’s good to know Tony Blair’s Government has our best interests at heart, and from today will allow us to carry on board small amounts of liquids, even though it was with small amounts of liquids – including contact lens solution – that al-Qaeda nutter Ramzi Yousef almost blew up Philippines Airline Flight 434 in 1994. (And it’s also a relief to know that though bottles of water or other drinks of a certain size – i.e. the only size they are sold in – will continue to be confiscated, they’ll be available to buy in the airport shops on the other side of security.)

AMNESIA

Hmmmm. I don’t know about you but to me, none of this makes much sense.
If the heightened security of the last three months was designed to prevent terrorists taking liquids onto a plane and concocting a bomb, what exactly has changed? Have the world’s finest terrorist minds been struck with collective amnesia and forgotten how to put together a lethal incendiary device made from a selection of easily-obtained liquids and chemicals? Or has every commercial airliner been made bomb-proof?
Maybe security is being relaxed because the Government has come under so much pressure from British Airways, Ryanair and other airlines who claim the delays and cancellation of flights cost them hundreds of millions of pounds? Back in August, the zero tolerance of any size or shape of hand luggage was eventually relaxed. Could this have been in response to protests from airport shops which saw their takings plummet as passengers were denied from taking anything at all on board planes? I guess we’ll never really know until the forensic teams are combing through the wreckage of another Lockerbie or Twin Towers atrocity.
Here’s an amazing, little-known fact: there have been 77 incidents involving bombs on commercial airliners since 1933. These have cost the lives of 2,594 passengers, crew and people passing by underneath.(Full gory details here) This doesn’t include hi-jacks not involving bombs, such as 9/11.
Presumably after each of these incidents, a group of security and intelligence experts have sat down in a quiet room with a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits and thrashed out what they could have done better to have prevented the disaster. And since two ex-cons admitted to planting a bomb on board a Douglas DC-3 aircraft in a bid to murder a passenger so that his wife would be free to marry another man in 1949, airport security, detection and surveillance systems have supposedly got better and better.
So why do I find it so hard to believe that airport security was ramped up to the absolute max immediately after 9/11? Certainly, once we’d recovered from the shock of seeing something so otherworldly as two passenger jets being flown into two of the most iconic buildings on the planet, it seemed as if security chiefs had finally been jolted from the complacency which had permitted those 70-plus previous incidents to occur. Cockpit doors became armoured and locked, passenger profiling was introduced and stainless steel cutlery was replaced by plastic knives and forks. And then a couple of months later, they introduced an even more sophisticated anti-terror measure – passengers had to remove their shoes for inspection before boarding their flights.
But then came the alleged plot to blow up 10 airplanes in August. And while the Government and MI5 celebrated the thwarting of the plot, arrested suspects and tightened security at airports, no-one really thought to ask: hang on a minute, why does airport security need tightening if we’ve already been taking every available precaution since 9/11? While the media gleefully reported that the alleged terror plot involved bombs made from harmless-looking liquids, no-one thought to question why this possibility hadn’t been considered before. After all, hadn’t Ramzi Yousef managed to put together a bomb made from harmless-looking liquids on board a flight in 1994(killing one passenger, injuring 10 and causing significant damage to the plane)? And weren’t security experts supposed to learn from that sort of thing and come up with solutions over their tea and biscuits?
As a nervous flyer, I devoured every morsel of press during those couple of weeks in August. The lone, questioning voice I found was that of intelligence expert and respected author Phillip Knightley. “We have been conned for years over our airport security,” he wrote in The Independent. “We had been led to believe that every possible precaution had been taken to prevent a terrorist carrying a bomb on to a plane in hand luggage. This turns out not to be true.”(Read full story here)

PROFITS

So why hadn’t every possible precaution been taken? And why is the level of security being reduced from today? Could it, by any chance, have something to do with protecting airports' profits? Britain’s leading airports operator, BAA, made £621 million pre-tax profit last year. Most of this was derived from its role as one of Britain’s biggest landlords, collecting rent from nearly 1,000 shops. A level of security taken to its logical, maximum conclusion would severely dent the revenue of these shops and in turn damage the amount of rent the airports could charge them(See Airport Security – The Great Consumer Rip-Off here). And as regular readers will know, I recently breached airport security by exploiting a loophole common to airports all over the world. This loophole simply wouldn’t exist if airport security was cranked up to the absolute maximum. But because it does, I was able to board a plane with a weapon every bit as deadly as the box-cutters used by the 9/11 hijackers. (Full story and photos here) Strangely, no newspapers were interested in reporting the story. Even more disconcertingly, neither the British Airports Authority, the Department of Transport(which is responsible for security at all Britain’s airports) nor its US counterpart , the Transportation Security Administration, deemed the matter sufficiently serious to merit a response(the latter has merely bombarded my in-tray with nearly a dozen identical, automated replies acknowledging receipt of my email).
Should we be frightened? Maybe not. There’s probably still more chance of you being run over by a paparazzo chasing Sophie Anderton than there is of being blown up over Birmingham or having your plane flown into Canary Wharf. But should we be pissed off? Yes, very. You know that £100 ticket to Malaga you’ve just bought? Well, depending on which airport you’re flying from, between £7 and £12 of that fare is the Passenger Service Charge, which goes directly to the airport operator(and shouldn’t be confused with airport tax, which goes to the government). This is supposed to go towards the cost of security and other essential airport facilities. So why do I get the feeling most of it goes towards building new shop units for Caviar World or The Perfume Gallery?
Meanwhile, judging from the indifference shown by the TSA to my expose of airport security, things don’t appear much better in the good ol’ US of A. You’d have thought that since Jack Graham smuggled 25 sticks of dynamite on to a United Airlines flight from Denver to Portland in 1955(killing 44 passengers and crew), the “world’s policeman” would have got its own airline security sorted. The events of 9/11 nearly 50 years later proved not. Not only had the 9/11 hijackers beaten airport security, they had also made a mockery of US intelligence and border controls. As Jane Corbin revealed in her masterly book, The Base: In Search of al-Qaeda, the FBI failed to see anything suspicious about the transfer of huge amounts of money from abroad to a suspect’s bank account, nor in the student pilots who didn’t want to learn how to take off or land. And then US Immigration – renowned the world over for treating visitors like me and you as pieces of shit stuck to their shoes - quite brilliantly allowed one of the hijackers back into the US despite the fact he was on the FBI’s suspect list and despite the fact his student visa was out of date.
Remember, it’s not the flying you should be frightened of…….
© Jack Havana 2006. Reproduction in part or whole prohibited without Jack’s permission.
This week, Jack Havana recommends……
MUSIC: Overloaded: The Singles Collection, by Sugababes. A worthy celebration of the most stylish Brit girl band of the last decade. Listen here.
FILM: Airplane!(1980). Hilarious disaster movie spoof or prescient indictment of the state of airport security today?
BOOK: The Base: In Search of al-Qaeda, by Jane Corbin. Cold comfort to the relatives of the thousands killed during the War on Terror as BBC journalist Corbin delivers a compelling, coherent account of how 9/11 could have been prevented.
CIGAR: Montecristo No. 5. Size and taste make this the perfect pre-breakfast smoke.