Seconds to Disaster: US Edition Read Online Free Page B

enforced in airports
worldwide. And yet deadly terrorist incidents still occur.
    On Dec 25, 2009, Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian national with an Al Qaeda connection, attempted to
blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 travelling from Amsterdam to Detroit with
290 people on board. Abdulmutallab had sewn plastic explosives into his
underwear. The device—a binary chemical bomb and “a weapon of mass destruction”
according to the FBI charge sheet—failed to detonate properly as the aircraft
approached Detroit. The terrorist’s clothes were set on fire in the attempt and
a Dutch passenger, Jasper Schuringa, tackled and restrained him as other
passengers helped put out the blaze, which in itself had the potential to cause
serious havoc and damage on board.
    This incident had the capacity
to cause mass death and destruction but failed because of the clumsy attempts
of the terrorist and the quick actions of passengers and crew.  But terrorists
learn from their mistakes.
    In the words of one security
expert, Johannes Beck, “There are always cracks in a suit of armor. A terrorist
only has to succeed once but security or counter-terrorist agencies whose task
it is to prevent the terrorists have to succeed all the time.”
    There are no reasons to
believe that terrorist attacks will not continue, despite added and increased
measures to counter it. Terrorists will simply try to find new ways to overcome
the counter-measures. The dissolution of Al Qaeda, like the dissolution of the
PLO, may create a whole constellation of new and determined terror groups whose
focus will be to hit western interests, and that especially includes aviation
targets, because such incidents target large numbers of innocent civilians and
create such a high media profile.
    The Achilles’ heel of the
airline business is its regular schedules and its massive volume of passengers.
In an effort to stem further binary bomb attacks such as the December 25th
incident, full-body scanners are to be introduced into major international
airports.
    But as security expert Beck
adds, “Body scanners of themselves are not going to end the terrorist threat.
The terrorists will simply discover more devious and clever ways of trying to
hijack or destroy an aircraft. Body scanners may put an extra barrier in their
path but the terrorist will eventually find a way of overcoming that additional
barrier, and any other that is put in their path.”
    The truth is, any security
tends to be reactive, in that it often shifts up a gear or two or alters its
focus after the event: listen to the media reports in the aftermath of an
incident or attack and you’ll hear the oft-quoted “Passengers face even tighter
security and longer delays at international airports after today’s terrorist
threat…”
    How much tighter can you make
already tight security?
    Obviously it wasn’t watertight
to begin with.
    The terrorist threat is also
one of the major concerns of the International Federation of Airline Pilots
Association, the umbrella group which represents pilots worldwide. The US body,
ALPA International, which was successful in pushing for passenger screening in
the 70’s recently produced a white paper on this threat.
    “A profoundly important gift
was given to commercial aviation on Christmas Day 2009 when a failed terrorist
attack against Northwest Flight 253 provided a wake-up call. We were reminded
yet again, that highly determined radicals and extremists continue to plot new
and different ways to inflict great economic harm on an airline industry which
has yet to fully recover from the staggering costs inflicted on September 11,
2001.”
    With such concerns in mind, it
may make you wonder what kind of man or woman would want to face a potentially
hostile work environment in which they also have to strap themselves into a
cockpit seat and go hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles per hour in
an aluminum tube?
    Not only have they the growing
threat of an act of