The use of armed guards aboard aircraft is being dubbed by critics as the 'Hollywood response' to a security threat better tackled on the ground, writes Gerry Byrne
Aviation security experts could be forgiven for feeling there is something ironic in the recent announcements by the US Federal Government that, whenever a terrorist threat is forecast, it wants armed guards on flights from Europe, including Ireland. For years, while European airports and airlines applied layer after layer of extra security in the wake of a wave of destructive Palestinian attacks, the penny-pinching US aviation sector successfully campaigned to reduce, not increase, security at US airports.
America was, paradoxically, the one country which should have had tougher, not weaker, security because, prior to 9/11, it had suffered 234 recorded hijackings. One US airline, Eastern, accounted for 47 hijacks or 20 per cent of that total. All of Western Europe, on the other hand, accounted for just 57 hijacks during the same period.
September 11th, 2001 was not an isolated occurrence either. There had been a hijack attempt less than two months earlier at New York's JFK Airport, within sight of the Twin Towers, when a man armed with a pistol entered a National Airlines Boeing 757 while it was boarding. He was persuaded to surrender peacefully but the event demonstrated glaring loopholes in US airport security. Amazingly, there was no attempt to beef up precautions in the wake of such a breach of security.
Equally amazing was the fact that some of the 9-11 hijackers had earlier aroused FBI suspicions but their reports were not followed up by senior officials. The hijackers seized four jetliners and succeeded in crashing three of them into both Twin Towers and the Pentagon in Washington, causing enormous loss of life. A fourth crashed in rural Pennsylvania with the loss of all aboard.
The American response, the formation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), has not had a happy history, as its first months were blighted by corporate mushrooming. Its first director, John Magaw, concentrated on developing an alternative law-enforcement agency, complete with armed officers, instead of simply ensuring adequate security measures were in place at US airports. A year after 9-11, for example, private security companies, which paid workers less than McDonald's, were still employed at most US airports, instead of supposedly more highly trained and better motivated Federal employees.
While the TSA was being developed, complete with snazzy logos and designer uniforms, there were few bomb-detection machines at work in the US; for the past three years, for example, Dublin, a relative backwater in aviation terms, has boasted far more advanced bomb-detection machinery than most major US cities. Yet Magaw missed deadline after deadline for the installation of bomb-detection equipment as his officials squabbled with airport companies and failed to agree on a common specification for the equipment. After Magaw was fired the picture slowly improved but more than $6 billion had been spent with little to show for it.
But all is still not well in US security. Posing as terrorists with concealed weapons, government agents have repeatedly probed airport defences and found them wanting. And recent events, when flights from France, Britain and Mexico have been met by jet fighters with armed missiles, or even turned back, may have been generated as much by confusion as by accurate intelligence on genuine terrorists. In the case of six recent Air France flights which were either cancelled or turned back, the French authorities reacted by accusing the Americans of incompetence and wrongly translating Arabic names. Shortly before Christmas, two airline pilots from Trinidad and Tobago, flying for the West Indies airline BWIA, were arrested by the FBI when their names appeared on a TSA "no-fly" list. It emerged the men were listed in error and they were released with apologies.
Meanwhile, other groups have been writing their own air-security policies, none less so than America's trigger-happy pilots, a majority of whom successfully campaigned to repeal legislation banning guns from cockpits. Federal law once required pilots to be armed when carrying US mail, a throwback to the days of Wells Fargo. Indeed, one pistol-packing pilot, in the 1950s, foiled an attempted hijacking by shooting the teenage would-be hijacker dead. But, although they have succeeded in getting Congressional approval to carry weapons again, pilots have still not secured agreement with the authorities on how and when those guns are to be used.
In the face of such dithering, it was inevitable that what one wit called the Hollywood solution would emerge. Just as a film director with a sagging plot introduces the obligatory gunfight or car chase to liven things up, so the Americans have returned to the notion of having armed marshals in the passenger cabin.
Armed marshals were randomly introduced to US aircraft in the wake of a rash of hijacks by Cubans seeking free passage to Havana in the late 1950s, but their numbers had faded to almost negligible proportions by 2000. Now they are back but it's a typically frontier solution to a problem others say could be better tackled on the ground, before the aircraft takes off, by properly screening passengers.
American pilots differ markedly with their European colleagues, who say the pilot's job in a hijack emergency is to keep the cockpit door locked and land the plane as quickly as possible. As 9-11 showed, today's determined hijackers want to get the controls and once they do everyone is doomed anyhow. The cockpit doors of most airliners, once (pre-9-11) weaker than the average wardrobe, are now extremely tough affairs that cannot be easily broken down, giving pilots valuable breathing space as they try to land the aircraft. Mid-air shootouts, European pilots say, either by themselves or armed marshals, can only distract them from that vital mission.
There is some precedent in their favour. Although air marshals have successfully defeated hijackers, especially the highly trained Israelis aboard El Al jetliners, in too many cases pilots have ended up crashing their aircraft as noise, panic and fear erupts around them.
Even the stress of having a hijacker on board is unnerving enough to cause fatal pilot error. That's probably what happened aboard an Air Vietnam Boeing 727 in September 1974 when the pilot of a hijacked aircraft, attempting to land, overshot the runway and crashed. All 75 aboard died. In 1977, a hijacked Malaysian 737 unexpectedly stalled and crashed into a swamp, killing all 100 aboard and leading to the suspicion that the distracted pilots were unaware they were running out of fuel. In 1996 an Ethiopian airlines Boeing 767 crashed in the sea off Grand Comore in the Indian Ocean, killing 125 when it too ran out of fuel during a hijack.
As if landing an aircraft is not stressful enough, there's even more pressure on pilots when violence does erupt. In October 1990, 82 died when a hijacked Xiamen Airlines' Boeing 737 crash-landed and collided with two other airliners at Guangzhou-Baiyun Airport in China. The pilot had been attempting a normal landing but the hijackers tried to prevent it by struggling with the crew in the cockpit when they realised they were not landing at either Hong Kong or Beijing as they had ordered.
And it's not always much better when air marshals intervene. Mayhem erupted during a 1986 hijacking of an Iraqi Airways Boeing 737 when air marshals tried to prevent hijackers gaining the cockpit. Grenades were thrown by the hijackers and the aircraft crashed on landing at Arar in Saudi Arabia, killing 63 of the 106 aboard.
Although it has yet to happen, there is also the fear that a group of unarmed hijackers will stage a fake hijack to provoke the air marshal to show his hand. Then their colleagues will simply overpower him from behind to give them control over his weapon, from which moment a more deadly game will begin. Air marshals have also shot innocent passengers dead by mistake.
The fear remains that badly aimed shots at cruising altitude, if they puncture the skin of the fuselage, could lead to immediate depressurisation of the aircraft and the quick death of anyone not able to reach his or her emergency oxygen in time, and, admittedly a very remote possibility, even a mid-air break-up.
That's not to say that well-trained air marshals who keep their nerve have not proved their worth. Israeli air marshals usefully put paid to the career of serial Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled, and killed her accomplice, during a hijack without injury to either the aircraft or the passengers and crew. But equally, good airport security at Heathrow subsequently foiled an attempt to smuggle a bomb aboard an El Al airliner in the luggage of an unfortunate Irish woman who had been fooled into a fake engagement with a Palestinian, who, unsurprisingly, said he would travel on a later flight.
That, say European airlines and their pilots, is where the emphasis should lie, in preventing the hijacker, or his bomb, from boarding the aircraft in the first place.
It doesn't make things easier for passengers, however, as more identity papers and background checks are needed and increased security could see the end of last-minute flight bargains for passengers who may need to book in plenty of time for security checks to be completed. US officials now want to see passenger lists an hour before departure but it's still leading to alarms after, not before, take-off.
Irish flights are, at the time of writing, unaffected, but the Government is under pressure from Washington to quickly install armed marshals aboard Aer Lingus flights should security concerns arise. Although Army rangers and some gardaí have trained in armed intervention in ground-hostage situations, they have little or no airborne training simply because existing Irish policy has been to combat terrorism before, not after take-off.
Indeed, Aer Lingus's only hijack experience occurred in 1981 when an ex-monk claiming to be carrying a bomb took over a flight to London and had it diverted to Le Touquet in France. He was soon persuaded to surrender and was found to be unarmed. His mission was not the reunification of Ireland or freedom for Palestine but simply to learn the Third Secret of Fatima.
Career of a hijacker: Leila Khaled
Prior to the Twin Towers attack in 2001, the worst spate of hijackings started in August 1969 when Leila Khaled, a 24-year-old Palestinian woman, suddenly whipped out a pistol and took over a TWA flight en route to Tel Aviv via Rome. The aircraft landed in Syria, where she was arrested but later quietly released.
Despite doing a series of subsequent media interviews she was undetected in September 1970 before attempting to take over an El Al flight between Tel Aviv and New York. She was overpowered by air marshals and her colleague was killed. She was arrested when the plane diverted to London but released in return for British hostages aboard three other British aircraft, which Palestinians had hijacked and flown to airfields in Jordan and Lebanon. After the hostages were released the aircraft were spectacularly blown up.
Now retired from hijacking, Khaled lives in the Jordanian capital with her husband, a doctor, and two sons.