Fear of Flying?

My cynical comment to the Post blog at that time was that if Spicocchi had committed all of these abusive acts against an ordinary citizen while inside of an airport he could have gotten away with it all and more–even murder–and would not have suffered the slightest punishment or judicial process. He might have even received a commendation, I thought acidly at the time.

These observations may seem slightly exaggerated and, yes, they are indeed the product of the frustration that comes with the increasingly agonizing experience of being a regular air traveler. I do a tremendous amount of flying commercially, most of it internationally, and there is almost nothing about air travel that promises the convenience and relaxation it had many years ago. But, beyond all of this unpleasantness it is today painfully obvious that an air passenger–once inside the confines of an airport in any part of the world–has no rights whatsoever.

This includes not even the right to be protected from security and law enforcement personnel who do not seem to understand any force other than deadly force. Security, police, and passenger screening personnel in any airport have near-dictatorial powers and almost limitless discretion to decide who needs to be put into a chokehold and thrown into a windowless room until someone can decided what set of ridiculously overblown charges need to be leveled against them.

A case in point being the 42-year-old female Secret Service agent, Monica Emmerson, who this past June was threatened with arrest and surrounded by a phalanx of Transportation Security Agency (TSA) officers for the heinous crime of having spilled on the floor at Reagan National Airport ordinary drinking water from her 19-month-old toddler’s sippy cup. One website commenting on the incident stated that “I guess because they didn’t beat her to a pulp, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) claims that its ‘Officers’ did not ‘Hassle Female Passenger with Toddler at Reagan National Airport over Sippy Cup.’ Perhaps the agency needs a dictionary with ‘hassle’ defined in one-syllable words that even its cretins can understand.”

Now, I thought this was all a bit harsh, but little did I realize how spot-on some of these comments by myself and others would turn out to be. Specifically, I refer to the incident at Phoenix airport that led to the death of Carol Gotbaum on 30 September. The 45-year-old mother of three was late for a flight to Tuscon and when she demanded to be let on board the airplane, which had not yet pulled away from the gate, she was manhandled to the ground and handcuffed–all the while screaming “I am not a terrorist. I am not a criminal. I am a sick mother. I need help.” What she got was the kind of help that I used to receive as a freshman during college fraternity hell week.

Law enforcement officials contend that she was out of control and had to be restrained but witnesses interviewed by the family’s attorney, Michael C. Manning, tell a different story that seems like a script from a T.J. Hooker episode. According to accounts in the New York Times “the police approached her, according to witnesses, made no effort to speak to her, calm her or assess the situation Two of them immediately took her to the ground.” Gotbaum was taken off to a holding cell and left alone with her hands cuffed behind her back while she screamed to be released.

After a period of 5-10 minutes (curiously, no one seems to be able to pin down the exact time in this case despite the fact that there was a death involved), and after she had stopped shouting, police looked into the holding cell and found Ms. Gotbaum with the metal chain used to attach the handcuffs to the cell bench stretched across her neck. She was unconscious and all attempts to revive her at this point failed. Her cause of death is still being investigated, but a private investigator who also attended the exam performed on Gotbaum by a private pathologist hired by the family stated that her body exhibited signs of “very serious trauma,” including bruises and a mark on her neck from the metal chain. In other words, these are injuries not consistent with the description of events given by the Phoenix authorities.

It is easy to just chalk this up as an isolated incident, but mounting evidence suggests that airport personnel have their reaction modes locked in the “overkill” position and the ferocity of their response seems to increase disproportionately as the perceived threatening or aggressive behaviour of a passengers decreases.

Back in August a 41-year-old Australian citizen, Sophie Reynolds, disembarked from a commuter flight in Pittsburgh only to be immediately pulled aside by no less than three uniformed police officers. The fully-armed police were spring-loaded with threats of filing federal charges against her. Given the size of the police full-court press one would think she had threatened the crew and passengers on board with a 14-inch, razor-sharp Crocodile Dundee bush knife during the flight.

But, nothing quite so dramatic was at hand. Reynolds’s dreadful offence was that when she was told during the beverage service pretzels were not available her response was “fair dinkum,” an Australian slang expression that means–in the vernacular of most US city dwellers–“for real?” US television watchers have only been exposed to this phrase for about 20 years–it having been one of the lines from Paul Hogan’s adverts promoting Australian tourism in the 1980s. More recently it was used in 2003 by US President George Bush on a trip to Australia as a compliment to Australian PM John Howard. “I called him a ‘man of steel,'” Bush said as he addressed the Parliament in Canberra. “That’s Texan for ‘fair dinkum.'”

But the two concepts of “shoot first and ask questions later” and “you are guilty for no other reason than the fact you are a passenger” are too far engrained in the minds of those who work the airlines and police the airports for them to bothered with trying to comprehend cultural differences. The Delta flight attendant was so certain she had been cursed at with profane language that she radioed ahead to have the paddy wagon waiting at the gate. Reynolds was allowed to go free only after authorities had consulted with a “linguist expert” who confirmed her language was in no way offensive.

What makes the plight of the average passenger even more frightening is the by-now famous “war on shampoo” liquids ban, which means passengers have no right to safeguard their health and administer life-saving medications.

Last October the Australian carrier QANTAS apologised to a diabetic who fell into a coma after staff refused to let him take his insulin on board a flight from Auckland to Christchurch. Tui Russell, a 43-year-old Auckland-based chef, was told by check-in staff that he could not take the clearly-labeled medication on board because it was “dangerous.” Without his insulin he suffered a severe attack on the flight and was hospitalised for two weeks after falling into a coma shortly before landing at Christchurch Airport. Auckland to Christchurch is a short–compared with international destinations–domestic flight within New Zealand. Were it a lengthier flight, it is doubtful he would have survived.

The following month a Swedish woman, Lidia Holsten, went into allergic shock and lost consciousness for half an hour on a flight from Paris to Stockholm. The reason was that her medication had been taken away during a security check at boarding. Holsten’s medicines were clearly labeled as prescriptions with her name printed on them, but were taken from her by personnel who only spoke French. The protestations she made to airport personnel that she suffered from severe asthma and that she needed her medication in-flight were ignored. “We don’t speak the language and the airport staff refused to speak anything other than French. They only pointed at a sign, threw our things away in a bin,” she recounted.

You do not have to be an alarmist to come to the conclusion that the risks to the life and general well-being of passengers seem to increase every time the list of items that cannot be carried on, what cannot be said/done, etc., gets longer. Each new restriction seems to give the security services a renewed sense that all of the passenger’s constitutional protections were suspended as soon as he or she walked into the terminal, so the usual rules do not apply.

But this is only half of the story. While the rent-a-cops are confiscating your asthma meds, your child’s baby formula, and that homecoming present of grandma’s homemade preserves, just look at what they are missing:

* March 5, 2007: A passenger packed 13 handguns, an automatic weapon, and eight pounds of marijuana in a suitcase and was able to board Delta flight 933 at Orlando International Airport bound for Puerto Rico. Puerto Rican police arrested Thomas Anthony Munoz, 22, as he was collecting his baggage at the Luis Munoz Marin International Airport in San Juan. A number of questions are raised by this incident–namely was Munoz’s baggage X-ray scanned before it was loaded? Munoz, it turns out, was a customer service agent at the Delta subsidiary of Comair, a job that allowed him to work both the check-in counter and the area where aircraft are loaded and unloaded. Munoz, knowing the holes in the system, used his Comair Airlines identification card to sneak the weapons on board. The weapons had been paid for by an accomplice in Puerto Rico who had wire transferred the money to him in order to purchase the weapons.

* October 25, 2006: Passengers waiting for the Naples-Milan early flight were told that the flight was delayed and then would be cancelled. Hysteria and anger ensued among the passengers, who were then told that the reason for the delay was that the airline crew, in their minibus on the way to the airport, had been held up and robbed. The passengers, who in any country are used to being lied to by airport personnel, thought this was another bogus excuse being put up by their failing national airline, Alitalia, and came fairly close to rioting. However, in this case the story was true. The entire crew had been robbed just before dawn by a gang of eight criminals, who made off with their watches and other valuables. Needless to say, if you can target, spot, and rob an airline crew on their way to the airport you can–in a classic terrorist scenario–also tie them up and leave them in a hotel room, take their uniforms and ID badges and cruise into the airport to do whatever damage you want.

* October 27, 2006: Screeners at Newark Liberty International Airport failed 20 of 22 security tests conducted by undercover U.S. agents the week before, missing an array of concealed bombs and guns at checkpoints throughout the hub’s three terminals, said federal security officials familiar with the results. “We can do better, and training is the path to improved performance,” said Mark Hatfield Jr., Newark Airport’s federal security director, declining to address specifics. (What a surprise.) “Test results are not a grade or a scorecard; they are a road map to perpetual improvement; any other characterisation is simply misleading. We have to challenge ourselves to do better every day and be relentless in that pursuit.” (That makes me feel so much better.)

No liquids, no gels, no creams, no toothpaste and no shampoo, but “bombs and guns, come on through,” seems to be the message.

But, my favourite detail of them all is that the famous liquid bomb plot that started in the UK and has made London/Heathrow (LHR) and other UK airports the most miserable on the planet turns out to have been a terrific farce.

In December of last year a Pakistani judge ruled there is not enough evidence to try the key suspect in the alleged airline bomb plot on terrorism charges. The case of Rashid Rauf, a Briton, was moved from an anti-terrorism court to a regular court, where he faces lesser charges such as forgery. The BBC’s Barbara Plett in Islamabad reported at the time that the judge’s decision has reinforced the already widespread scepticism there about the airliner ‘liquid explosive’ plot. Several commentators stated that this threat was deliberately exaggerated to bolster the anti-terror credentials of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

Given that the threshold of what constitutes credible evidence in a place like Pakistan is much lower than it is in most western democracies “lack of evidence” means no evidence at all in this case. Also, in another tell-tale sign that the entire “plot” was a send-up designed to scare the public, British authorities have shown little interest in extraditing Rauf to the UK to actually question him themselves and act as though they hope everyone will forget who was the supposed “mastermind” of this plot in the first place.

This theory is bolstered by what was discovered–or rather by what was not discovered–back home in jolly old England.

After the liquid bomb plot scare broke at LHR, the Thames Valley police spent five months combing the woods near High Wycombe–where the liquid bomb-making materials were supposed to have been hidden–and never found anything. The exercise was so fruitless and the basis for that search apparently so unfounded that the Thames Valley department told the UK Home Office on December 12, 2006, that they would discontinue their activity unless the central government was prepared to pick up the costs for all of their extra manpower overtime and resources expended. Apparently, they see no benefit in continuing to try and locate any evidence of these liquid explosives.

Which says that the view of local UK law enforcement is that this liquid bomb plot was a myth to begin with. Police departments tend to not take real threats to public safety lightly and have been known to deploy countless personnel for weeks to find one, single murderer. When the terror plot originally was “unmasked” it was billed as a plan for carnage several times worse than the 9/11 attacks. Thus, it strains credibility to believe that the Thames Valley authorities would think of abandoning their search for even a second if they thought this liquid bomb plan had turned out to be anything other than a complete red herring.

Simply put, the War on Shampoo seems to have had little effect other than to make the life of the post-9/11air traveller even more miserable than it already was. One wonders why the no liquids ban remains in place.

But, I am not the only one asking that question. Some EU officials feel the same way. The European Parliament has called the security measures for carry-on luggage at European airports “arbitrary.” London airports are the worst offenders here, having instituted a one carry-on only rule that no one in UK officialdom will now own up to having ordered in the first place. EU officials have also criticised how the rules were implemented and question their necessity. The issue of transit passengers having duty free goods confiscated at connecting airports in the EU has also come under scrutiny. European Parliament Deputies (MEPs) warned that “Brussels” is responsible for “lakes of perfume and whisky” and piles of shaving foam, toothpaste, and lipstick building up at European airports. Some reports indicate as much as 20 tonnes of duty free goods are confiscated weekly at Frankfurt, 1,500 liters of alcohol and perfume at Amsterdam and 10,000 items a week at Madrid. MEPs also challenged the democratic legitimacy and accountability of the Commission regulation, some of which is kept secret.

I keep looking for a silver lining in this story, but I cannot find one. The air travel industry is one of the most strategically important businesses worldwide and yet our government institutions seem to be doing their best to sabotage it. Airlines last month in the United States had some of their worst on-time performance yet, personnel are quitting in droves, and the well-heeled businessmen (who generate most of the revenues for the airlines) keep finding ways to escape airline hell. One of the biggest selling products now is a new line of mini business jets, the Phenom models, made by Brazil’s Embraer. Business travelers can now fly from one municipal airport to another on one of these small minijets and bypass the whole sippy-cup Gestapo.

This is fine for them, but it spells doom for the airlines. You cannot make enough money to keep an airline running if you are never on time and your only passengers are the people flying on bargain fares.

Some of the big European carriers have their own problems. Internationally, people have already begun to shun the UK airports and other major hubs that have become impossible to transit through and are clogged with passengers forced to undergo increased security checks and scrutiny, but with no increase in personnel or equipment to process them. “We are no longer the hub of Europe, a blind man could see it,” said a British Airways ground services agent on one my last flights through LHR. “People are fed up with the way they are being treated here.”

I have a lot of friends who ask me–as an almost constant international air traveller–how I feel about flying in the post-9/11 world. My answer is, “no, I am not any more afraid of flying than before, but I am a lot more afraid of what can happen to me on the ground in an airport than I could ever have previously imagined.” One hopes that some of this will change before the air travel system worldwide becomes completely broken, but at present I see little cause for optimism.

Reuben F. Johnson, a defense and aerospace correspondent for THE WEEKLY STANDARD, was a 13-year Gold Card holder with British Airways until he decided he could not tolerate another flight through London/Heathrow.