Air marshals ride again - at a sky-high price

31 Dec, 2001 09:13 AM7 mins to read

Herald correspondent ROGER FRANKLIN says a new security measure will swallow billions.

NEW YORK - During the first wave of aircraft hijackings in the early 1970s, a revered American came up with a novel way of making sure no more planes were kidnapped to Cuba, Syria or what now seem, after September 11's one-way flights to oblivion, other innocent destinations.

"What they gotta do," advised Archie Bunker of All In the Family, "is give every passenger a gun."

Thirty years later, if you are to judge by precautions being hastily introduced on air routes in America and around the world, it is easy to suspect that security aloft is being overseen by a comedy hero of a different stripe, someone like Sir Humphrey Appleby of Yes, Prime Minister.

Instead of Bunker's brutally impractical solution, air travellers are being asked to accept that the bureaucratic mind offers the best hope for their security.

As Sir Humphrey might have put it in one of his rare moments of candour, an expensive, complex and labour-intensive policy is always preferable to its cheaper and simpler alternative.

A case in point: sky marshals.

The dust was still settling over the rubble of the Twin Towers when America's policymakers dusted off the idea of putting incognito armed guards on every United States flight.

Capitol Hill's lawmakers were all for it. The pundits signed on to a man, and polls confirmed that the public was eager to see a corps of skyborne sheriffs quickly sworn in.

A great idea - but only at first glance, as America's hasty attempts to improve airport security in general, and reintroduce sky marshals in particular, are making increasingly clear.

Unlike Australia, say, where the far smaller number of planes and daily flights mean it is at least possible to put sky marshals on a significant number of planes, the 30,000-odd scheduled passenger planes taking off and landing every day at America's airports make that goal impractical in the extreme.

Even covering a small percentage of flights - all the Bush Administration intends to do - will require enormous outlays.

Texas Senator Kaye Bailey Hutchinson says it will cost a minimum of $US1 billion ($2.4 billion) a year to protect what will be, on a good day, less than 2 per cent of flights.

And here is the contradiction inherent in what one sceptic, journalist and aviation author Gregg Easterbrook, brands the "reactive approach to security".

Though Hutchinson insists it will be money well spent, she concedes that sky marshals may be of little practical use - something that was made clear when an alert stewardess foiled British-born "shoe bomber" Richard Reid as he tried to destroy an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami.

If Reid's jerry-rigged fuse had detonated the explosives in his heels as intended, a posse of sky marshals could have done nothing to save the lives of the 180 souls on board.

Nor does history offer much comfort. Sky marshals, introduced in response to the original wave of hijackings more than 30 years ago, had an inglorious history of inactivity in their first incarnation. True, stewardesses appreciated their presence when boisterous drunks needed to be pacified, but these were not the missions for which they had been commissioned and funding shrank in step with the number of hijackings.

By 1993, only a vestigial corps of sky marshals was still flying.

Four years later, when the watchdog Government Accounting Office took a look at the programme, the resulting report was a foretaste of the we-better-do-something-quick attitude now dominating the thinking on Capitol Hill.

Air marshals were expensive and inefficient, the GAO concluded, but if the public felt reassured by their notional presence, then it was Congress' job to decide if continued funding should be made available.

Congress reduced funding to a trickle, just enough to preserve a nucleus of sky marshals and pay for the upkeep of their training facility in Atlantic City, a four-hour drive south of New York. There, recruits could practise shooting with "fractile" bullets designed to shatter rather than pierce an aircraft's internal skin, dress up in ninja suits and retake a "captured" control tower and perfect unarmed combat techniques in the cramped aisles of two retired passenger jets.

Then came September 11, the day on which everything - including the rules of hijacking - changed forever.

Until Mohamed Atta and his 18 colleagues commandeered those four jets, it had been assumed that hijackers were at least moderately keen on escaping with their lives.

With the tacit approval of US aviation authorities, airlines all but announced they would do little to fight back. Both sides recognised a contract of sorts.

That is why cockpit doors were never reinforced with steel bars and bulletproof Teflon, as is being done now. Such obstacles, it was deemed, would only encourage hijackers to murder the odd passenger to encourage cooperation.

Official policy said it was better to do as the cockpit intruders asked and wait for negotiators or, in the worst case, a Swat team to bring the drama to a conclusion.

But September 11 scrapped the unwritten agreement that had bargained passengers' lives against the hijackers' goals.

Now, as Attorney-General John Ashcroft observed, it is in the best interests of passengers and flight crew alike to fight back.

"Like the passengers on Flight 93, we are all air marshals now," Ashcroft said of September 11's fourth jet, which crashed in Pennsylvania as desperate passengers battled to regain control.

Well, not exactly.

As Easterbrook noted in recent articles about America's air-security shambles, the most effective response to a hijacker is a gun.

He didn't go as far as Archie Bunker, but his overall point was much the same. As well as increasing the number of sky marshals, why not arm every pilot? Most US civilian pilots learned their craft in the military, where they never took off without a sidearm in the cockpit.

And why stop there? Off-duty police officers might also be given low-velocity ammunition, others suggested, and allowed to take their weapons on board whenever they went on vacation.

It was not to be - and for reasons that have more to do with politics than practicality. A civil rights leader in Los Angeles summed up one element of the instant opposition when he ranked the LAPD as "second only to Osama bin Laden" as a danger to citizens. Invoking memories of Rodney King, he said the thought of allowing his city's cops to open fire at 30,000ft "just makes me shudder with fear".

Objections of a different sort were raised against arming pilots, particularly by the airlines, which quietly instructed their Washington lobbyists to inform congressmen that they did not fancy being sued if passengers were injured or killed by pilots returning fire.

So, by default, sky marshals get to ride again - a remedy Easterbrook sees as too little, too late.

Terrorists will keep testing security arrangements until they find another chink.

First it was exploding shoes. Next time perhaps a bomb in the luggage hold that will be detonated by a command sent via mobile phone from the passenger compartment.

Unlike conventional warfare, air terrorism is a field of conflict where the advantage lies with the attacker.

Easterbrook does have another suggestion, one that might redefine the aerial battlefield.

Modern jetliners are now so automated, he points out, they can be flown by remote control. Why not equip planes with a system that allows ground controllers to land the plane at the nearest major airport?

"Almost any jetliner with automatic landing capability can land on autopilot at a 'Category III' airfield that maintains special guidance beacons. If aircraft had panic buttons that transferred control for an immediate landing, the incentive to stage hijackings would decline precipitously."

So, too, would the incentive to spend billions on sky marshals - much to the regret of America's bureaucratic empire builders now paying their addled homage to the creed of Sir Humphrey.

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