Air FrightWhy Nov. 28 will prove scarier in the long run for airline passengers than Sept. 11.
Posted Sunday, Dec. 1, 2002, at 2:07 PM ETI avoid making predictions. But I'll risk this one because if it's wrong everyone will be glad, including me. The prediction is that Nov. 28, 2002, the day terrorists shot surface-to-air missiles at a chartered Israeli airplane in Kenya, will be a more important divide in the history of airline travel than Sept. 11, 2001. Here's the reason: We can be fairly sure that attacks like those on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon will never happen again. We can be equally sure that other missile attacks will occur and that they will succeed. So, while the effects of Sept. 11 have slowed the airlines with ponderous layers of security, the effects of Nov. 28 could add a level of danger that deeply affects people's willingness to fly.
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StumbleUponThe difference between the two forms of terrorism involves the "demonstration effect." Once the civilian world saw that hijacked planes could be turned into weapons, it became much harder for future attackers ever to pull off that feat again. Everyone now understands the "United Flight 93" principle: While passengers cannot prevent an airplane from being hijacked or crashed, they can keep it from being used as a flying bomb. But once the terrorist world has seen missiles nearly hit an airliner, future attackers are more likely to try. They'll have better missiles; they'll take more careful aim; they'll learn from whatever mistake the attackers in Kenya made. And there is nothing the airlines can do to protect themselves—except stop flying.
Everything about airliners makes them vulnerable to attack. To land smoothly and safely, they must fly slowy, low, and in a straight line for many miles as they approach an airport. My house is seven miles, as the Airbus flies, from National Airport in Washington. When planes are making an instrument approach to National, in bad weather, they pass so low over my roof I could practically hit them with a bow and arrow. Airliners are more maneuverable than they look—a Boeing 707 prototype once did a barrel roll over Lake Washington in Seattle. In theory they could land the way fighter planes do, with an "overhead break" procedure that involves a dramatic last-minute swoop to the runway. But that would hardly reassure passengers, and in any case it can't be used in bad weather. I suppose airliners could, at great cost, be equipped with military-style spoofing devices to thwart some missiles. But at that point most sane passengers would decide to stay home.
The reality is that in anything resembling today's normal operating procedures, airliners are inescapably vulnerable to ground attack within a many-mile radius around any major airport. We couldn't hope to secure a dozen-mile safety zone around airports in Atlanta or Dallas, let alone Cairo or Jakarta. Surface-to-air missiles are so small, cheap, portable, and (reportedly) abundant on the black market that sooner or later terrorist groups will get and use them. The missile threat will mean to airline travel what the recent sniper episode means to metropolitan life. That is, once terrorist groups see how easy it is for a few people to generate widespread fear, and how impossible it would be to mount an effective defense, it is only a matter of time before it's done again. (If there were the slightest chance that terrorist groups had not already figured this out, I wouldn't mention it. But let's not kid ourselves.)
What this newly demonstrated vulnerability will eventually mean for airlines, for airplane companies, for international travel and tourism, for public confidence, for economies as a whole is more than anyone can predict. Whatever it means can't be good. For the moment the point is: Something important has just occurred.
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Notes From The Fray Editor:
Several Fraysters have noted that this was not the first time someone shot a missile at a commercial airliner (mmaren and reiddc, for example). But most of the responses have pooh-poohed the idea that this is a new risk: clutch_john thinks Americans won't care until it happens domestically while Thrasymachus thinks Americans aren't cowards. historyguy offers some other things that are scarier than SAM threats while Engram finds the good in even this little nightmare scenario.
Remarks From The Fray:
This is not the first time that terrorists have attempted to shoot down a plane with a shoulder-launched missile. And the previous time was in Kenya as well. When I was living there in the late 70s, a group of Palestinians and Germans, of the Baader-Meinhof variety, were arrested by Kenyan agents with the help of the Mossad while attempting to shoot down an El-Al jet using Nairobi's Kenyatta Airport. About a year later , in 1980, the Norfolk Hotel in Nairibi was bombed, possibly in retaliation for Kenya's cooperation with Israel.
-- mmaren
(To reply, click here.)
your point about how it might change people's views on air travel are correct. that is, except for the fact that no one in America cares about this instance because it happened outside of the country with a non-American plane. American blindness of all things not hurting Americans makes your prediction a little weak.
-- clutch_john
(To reply, click here.)
James Fallows need not worry about introducing the SAM idea to terrorists -- not only have they certainly already figured it out, it's been on TV, in particular in a 1970s British spy show called "Sandbaggers."
Maybe I'm hopelessly naive, but it seems to me that there is grounds for reassurance in the fact that this attack has been available for some time, but not utilized before. Missiles are difficult to conceal before launch, and afterwards leave a telltale trail of smoke indicating their point of origin, which has to complicate their use.
-- reiddc
(To reply, click here.)
The only way that this kind of terrorism could be significant is if it becomes so prevalent that it begins to affect the total level of risk assumed by air passengers. And we're nowhere even remotely close to that now. […]
By the way. . . when did Americans become such cowards? When did we reach this pernicious conclusion that any risk, however remote or hypothetical, was unacceptable? When did we come to value "security" to the point where any sacrifice (including, ironically, peace) became worthwhile?
-- Thrasymachus
(To reply click here.)
If you're in Kenya, and want to kill the maximum number of Israelis without leaving home, shooting down an airplane is the way to go. If you're in the United States, and want to kill the maximum number of Americans, why settle for a few hundred? You have so many other choices that shooting down a commercial airliner is hardly worth the trouble. For starters, all of the remaining skyscrapers, where your missile can aim for a stationery target, or your bomb can be delivered by cab and elevator if you don't have the launcher. Then there are the stadiums that hold up to 100,000 drunks on weekend afternoons and permit blimps to fly overhead; the essentially unguarded gas pipelines to and through all of our cities; the trains carying poisonous and/or explosive chemicals that can be derailed with a well-timed sledgehammer blow and ignited without much more . . .
-- historyguy
(To reply click here.)
Fallows said this about the Kenyan missile attack: "Whatever it means can't be good." Actually, it can be. Much of the world still thinks that the people committing acts of terrorism have legitimate grievances and that they are just fighting back in the only way that they can. The events of 9/11 changed a lot minds in that regard (including mine), but there are still many out there who don't appreciate the fact that we are dealing primarily with bunch of bloodthirsty lunatics stuck in a Middle Age mindset according to which tolerant, pluralistic societies are evil incarnate. Every shocking terrorist attack after 9/11 will help to open a few more eyes about this. And that, contrary to what Fallows suggests, can be good.
-- Engram
(To reply, click here.)
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