Only heroes and luck stop terrorists today

It has been a long time ago since the media last brought us news concerning the airlines and terrorism. Until Flight 253 of Delta Airlines departing Amsterdam bound for Detroit came in the news. Second day of Christmas brought us back to reality. If you want to know what happened, you can read all the news items concerning this event. What interests me more, is what went wrong and why. Even more interesting, how can we prevent this in the future.

A lot of comment has been given concerning the fact that the passenger who now is labeled as a terrorist, was on Terrorism Watch lists, that his father had warned the US government about the activities of his son. People pose the question: how could such a passenger board a US bound flight? But why try to find the blame in a paper carousel that is so far away from the operations on the ground and the true security measures that have been put into place.
Consider the following. All US bound passengers have to go through profiling. Passengers coming from connecting flights from anywhere must at some point before heading towards US territorial airspace go through the profiling process. This process was set up to filter passengers with evil intentions. Airport security, the x-ray people, are there to filter all equipment which might be dangerous for the flight. So, what happened?

The terrorist on this flight, HAD THE INTENT TO BLOW UP THE PLANE, so why wasn’t this detected by the profiler? This person was on the terrorist watch list, so when security checked his passport, either electronically or via a paper list, why did the system fail to detect his ‘membership’ on the watch list? One more question, do we truly believe that filtering ALL liquids from hand luggage has any sense? If the shoe bomber went to such lengths to hide his explosives, do we really think a terrorist would put the components of his explosive in his hand luggage? And if your answer is yes, because you believe in what airport security puts us through, why didn’t they detect the explosives on the 253 terrorist?
My answers to this are simple, as they are debatable. Airport security and the most common anti- terrorism measures are conducted out of habit. Daily routine, in which nothing happens day in day out. The operators are hardly qualified or trained well enough to be able to face the challenges presented by the terrorists. In some cases not even real terrorists, but simply lucky ones….
Concerning this flight, we were lucky to have a very vigilant and decisive passenger and a great crew on board. But one day we will have to wake up and face the music. The people we try to fight against are trained professionals, with no limits to their resources or imaginations. Our security, be it the one in Nigeria, or the one at Schiphol, are limited by the cost of training, legislation, level of commitment and our belief of being safe.
It is often said that we can’t put a price on human life. Apparently we can. Just consider the 12,50 euro per hour a profiler gets and the fact that he is expected to make a difference…

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