January 10, 2010
“I wish,” said my friend Perry, “that someone would tell the public the truth about airline security.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“That it’s largely theatre,” said Perry, who spent a large chunk of his working life doing airline and airport security. “That the objective is to make people feel that their safety is assured, even though it’s not. There’s no way to make air travel really safe not at any tolerable cost in money and inconvenience.”
“So they’re lying to us?” I said, remembering the security procedures I experienced in four countries last month.
“Not exactly, but they don’t admit that you can’t ratchet up security beyond a certain point,” he answered. “We could insist that you get to the airport six hours early, and that everyone going aboard, and every bag, be subjected to an intensive search, including body cavities. We could do that again at every station stop, or at every change of planes. We could assign squads of air marshals to every flight. We could forbid people from leaving their seats during the flight, for fear that they might get up to mischief in the washrooms. Hell, we could remove the washrooms.
“Do you think that even the airlines are eager for that level of security? If we had it, would anyone fly if they could possibly avoid it?”
True. Already the security process has made flying unpalatable.
“You bet,” said Perry. “In that sense, the terrorists have already won. They’ve thrown sand in the gears of commerce. But the system is still quite porous, and everyone in the security business knows it. Every country challenges its security system by trying to get people through it with weapons and explosives and so forth, and every country fails. The Americans used to publish their failure rate, which was about 33%. So they don’t publish those numbers any more.”
Does that mean that of every three fake terrorists who attempt to get through security, one succeeds?
“Yep,” said Perry. “People also believe that the security folks are probably catching all kinds of would-be terrorists, but they aren’t telling us about the interceptions. Not true. They hardly ever catch anyone.
“Take this latest guy, who mainly managed to cook his own crotch on the flight to Detroit. The Americans are going on about ‘our’ failure, the failure of ‘our’ security systems, the terrorism attempt in ‘our own’ airspace. It wasn’t in their airspace it was almost all in Canada’s airspace. If the guy had succeeded, there would have been a rain of airliner parts over Labrador, not Michigan.
“And the failure wasn’t the Americans’, either. The guy boarded the plane in Lagos, Nigeria. Then he flew to Amsterdam and changed planes but he didn’t have to go through security again, which is normal when you change planes in any major airport. You don’t leave the secure area. You just go from one plane to the other.
“So the only security screen he ever faced was in Lagos. How tight is the security system in Lagos? If it’s not very good — and I suspect it isn’t — then what do you do about it? Does the United States want to start pre-screening every flight that might connect into the United States, from every airport in the world? Indonesia? Syria? Dogkhatistan?”
Perry, I said, what do you think the public really needs to understand?
“If you fly, you may die,” he said promptly. “It’s not likely — there hasn’t been a successful terrorist attack on an airliner since 9/11, and millions of people have flown perfectly safely. But it’s just like Presidential security. If someone is really determined to kill the President and doesn’t mind dying in the process, there’s a definite chance that the President will be killed. If someone clever is really determined to bring down a plane, there’s a definite chance that the plane will go down.
“I suppose everything would be perfect is everyone flew naked, without cabin baggage.”
“Bare Air,” I said. “Perry, do you fly, yourself?”
“Hell, yes,” he said. “I fly all the time. It’s far, far safer than driving.”
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