Airport security? Don't make me laugh!

About 57 years ago I embarked on my first long-haul flight, from Gatwick to Salisbury Rhodesia.

 

I arrived at the terminal, a large Nissan hut left over from the war, which was the totality of Gatwick Airport in those days.

 

I presented my ticket, checked in my bag, passed Immigration with scarcely a cursory nod from the officer, and ambled onto the aircraft; elapsed time – ten minutes maximum.

 

Since that time I have criss-crossed the world and logged hundreds of passenger-hours My last (and it almost certainly will be now that air travel has ceased to be a mildly pleasurable adventure and become a deeply unpleasant ordeal) was from the Isle of Man to Gatwick, taxi to Heathrow, flight to Bangkok and finally to Chiang Mai.

 

That entailed three passes through ‘security’. And it’s a cruel farce. Jacket off, shoes off , belt off, laptop out. A tube of toothpaste is discovered in my carry-on. Out it goes. Then the aftershave.

 

Never mind the ‘sharps’. Woe betide you if you are found concealing nail scissors. Quite how you could hijack a 747 thus armed is a secret known only to ‘them’. A while back there was an amusing letter in the Telegraph from an airline Captain who recounted how this very thing happened to him. When he got into his seat at the business end of his jumbo, he was sitting next to the fire axe. In response, an airport policemen recounted how they also have to go through the identical checks while armed to the teeth with sub-machine guns, Tasers, tear gas and handcuffs.

 

But we can all acquire a handy weapon quite legally and openly.          A smashed litre bottle bought in  Duty Free or on-board might do rather more damage than nail scissors. The simple answer is for all duty-free liquor to be sold in plastic bottles, as they are in the bonded store. Much less weight also, although the contents will be just as flammable, which suggest  duty free sales at ‘arrivals’ instead of ‘departures’.

 

Which brings us to the nonsense of liquids. Scientists will say that it is impossible to manufacture a bomb from liquids whilst sitting in an economy-class seat (or anything else for that matter). The liquids ban is a fiction. Nobody has ever been detained for carrying suspicious liquids. And nobody has ever been detained as a result of removing their shoes!

 

None of this rigmarole has much to do with anti-terrorism.  But in the wake of recent events stand by for the politicians to start waffling about ‘increasing airport security even if this means more delays at check-in’. Those are the words of the Foreign Secretary already. And yet the TSA has a budget of $7 billion without detecting a single terrorist in 10 years.

 

The security systems are a bad joke: in undercover operations, Department of Home Security inspectors got fake bombs and firearms through the screening process in  67 out of 70 tests.

 

Passengers ought not to be prime suspects in  terrorist threats. Baggage handlers should be high on the list since they have no difficulty in opening passenger bags to steal valuables (30,000 reported cases in the US last year).

 

The simple truth is that airport security has never played a role in frustrating terrorist attack plans; all have been the result of good intelligence.

 

There is a solution, one which I advocated at least a year ago, and that is to follow best practice as demonstrated by El Al. I have a friend who does consultancy assignments in Gaza which means frequent air travel via Israel. He has never had a problem; security clearance is swift and thorough with minimum inconvenience to passengers,

 

So how do they do it?

 

This is where the evil pf PC rears its ugly head.

 

Instead of looking for weapons the Israelis look for suspects, and this means profiling. Hebrew-speaking Israelis get scant attention. A woman in a burka might warrant rather more but not necessaril. The El Al approach is not based on stereotypes but on psychological observation.

 

Insider threats are a particular danger; it is pretty certain that if the Sinai disaster was caused by a bomb, the most likely culprits will be airside workers – cleaners, refuellers, marshallers etc. It was certainly not a passenger!

 

The whole airport security structure is an unfunny farce designed to deceive us into believing that ‘something is being done’ when it is nothing  more than theatre.