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August 24, 2006


Up yours, so-called expert ...

THE SAFETY consultant was determined. Air passengers should not be allowed to take anything into the cabin.

As the UK Health and Safety Commission has had to accept, risk is never absolute. Officials have - at last - been forced to compromise and allow school activities that fears of prosecution seemed to prevent.

Contingency-fee lawyers may nevertheless attempt to pursue negligence claims for those who feel they have been endangered, and television commercials for accident or personal risk 'helplines' will continue to appear.

Reality and rationality must be retained. The airline safety 'expert' may claim that such precautions may reduce the probabilities of a plane being destroyed in flight by explosives, but what is the reality?

'Experts' too often are too focused. They concentrate on their own, narrow, disciplines and forget to look 'outside the box' at the experiences of others.

This particular expert has failed to acknowledge what police and customers tracking drug smuggling have known for ages - that unless every passenger is put through 'intimate' body searches, a determined terrorist will still be able to get explosives onto a plane.

Those who feel the call of martyrdom and are religiously suicidal will carry explosives in plastic containers in their rectums. They probably won't swallow liquids, in the way that drug-trafficking mules swallow condoms filled with narcotics. But the rectum is probably just about the right size for enough explosive, if recent reports are credible, to destroy an airliner. Onboard toilets become even more appropriate as temporary bomb-factories.

Alternatively, recent conflicts in the Balkans and the Middle East have been profitable markets for the manufacturers of surface-to-air missiles.

The Israeli military, probably abetted by the Pentagon, were able to use drones or satellites to monitor Hisbollah launching missiles from southern Lebanon this summer, but they knew where to look. Finding lone combatants - the noun 'terrorist' empowers them too much - firing missiles unexpectedly will be far more difficult for the authorities, even with all today's technology to call upon.

Getting missile launchers into the UK is not difficult. Drive across Europe, get on a ferry or even a private yacht and the chances of discovery are infinitesimal.

Then, a surface-to-air missile could be used from a yacht sailing off the Scottish Islands, not far from Prestwick Airport, where a radio beacon provides a key navigation point for flights to the US from much of northern Europe.

Radio scanners, high-powered binoculars, and published timetables would allow planes operated by US flag carriers to be singled out.

While the Lockerbie 'disaster' in 1988 was attributed to explosives in a tape player packed into check-in baggage, today's security emphasis has been to encourage more and more electrical devices to be checked-in.

With passengers banned from using mobile phones and other radio devices in flight, the scope for an electrical device to be smuggled into an aircraft's hold which later affects on-board systems to cause havoc, if not tragedy, remains. With more planes using fly-by-wire technology, travelers with longer memories understandably remain skeptical about the judgment, if not the expertise, of so-called security consultants.