• Buy your ticket with a major credit card. That way you will have a chance for a refund if you need it.

• Always get a paper ticket, instead of an e-ticket, so that in case you have to change carriers you will have a ticket in hand. For a FREE award ticket you can go with an e-ticket, as you will not be trying to have another airline honor it.

• If you are a little uneasy about flying that is understandable, given what our whole country has just gone through.  Go to Frommers.com and read all the letters to the Editor in praise of Air Travel since September 11th, written by people who have just completed trips and why it is the right thing to do, especially now.

• Don't be fooled by the "one hand carry rule", they don't really mean it. They mean one hand carry bag and one personal item such as a computer or purse. Women have the edge here, if you bring a big enough "bag" you can pack several hand carries in it and take it on.  I am still for carrying as much on as possible, so your stuff doesn't get lost. Next time, I will bring a cloth sack to combine things and later it can be folded up in my carryon suitcase when not needed.

• For anyone who feels that they are having trouble getting back to their "Normal" Life, you might want to  Click Here   to access WebMD's article: "When Will It Be OK to Be Happy?" Normal Life Expected to Mean Different Things for Different People.

Why I wrote this Article

This article is not meant to scare anyone, in fact it is meant to inform and to say that things had to change and now they are. 

Airline travel is much safer now than before September 11th and the best thing that we all can do is continue to fly.  If we let what happened scare us into not flying then the Terrorists have won. Not only will we lose out in the short run by not enjoying our freedom to travel, but we may loose it permanently, as the Airlines will surely have to go out of business if we all stop flying. 

This is the time to support not only the Airline Industry, but the cruise lines, trains, rental cars, as well.  We can not afford to let our Travel Industry bite the dust, we can not allow another blow to our nations economy and to our way of life. And we should not spend another minute letting something they have done dictate how we live our lives.

Yes, there is a lot of symbolism in reducing to rubble shining examples of our financial strength and freedom. Those were some of the world's tallest buildings standing in our monumental financial district, in the greatest city in the world. A place that is a beacon of freedom for the whole world. If we don't continue to fly now, we are in danger of continuing the pain, but this time the victims will be the Airline Industry; all the people who work for it and around it; and all of us who love to fly.
 

This page is solely the opinion of this Web site. It was written to try to help identify what has been wrong, in the past with our Security System. Now, since the horrific tragedy of September 11th there are major changes taking place Airline travel is already much safer. We have now flown since September 11th, we went to Las Vegas and had great flights all the way. The planes were packed and it was great to see everyone going about their lives, maybe not totally fearless, but at least determined not to miss a beat. We didn't and made some new friends along the way. Traveling is really priceless, there is no way to put a dollar value on the good it does for your soul.

Written by  Vicki Mills
Author of 
Fly Free, Stay Cheap!

Published by
Platypus Publications
ISBN 0-9661876-0-1

http://www.fly-free.com

email: platypub@infi.net
 

Article written - 09-14-01
updated - 10-03-02

Postscript:  01-28-02
Thanks to all the folks that responded so thoughtfully to this article.  We appreciate your enthusiasm for  the subject and for our ideas.  Lately, even more security has been imposed and has been accepted very positively.  I think we are heading in the right direction. The FAA is trying to close one of the avenues by mandating that all out- bound catering carts are inspected and sealed at the catering establishments.
We applaud this effort.  Everything helps!

Airline Security is an oxymoron purely because there is no such thing as total Airline Security.  Yes, you can secure a plane, but it would have to be without passengers or cargo. The very act of loading passengers or cargo opens the plane to all kinds of attacks on its security.  From the nature of the Cargo to the intentions of the passengers there are threats from every direction. For example; A plane has many different groups of people working on it between the time it blocks at its gate, until the time that it pushes back from that gate or another one.  First there are ground handlers, the ones who make sure the plane is parked properly, cargo doors opened, belt loaders driven up to cargo holds to offload passenger luggage, cargo and mail.  Then there are different people who may or may not be Airline employees who go through the jetway or up the steps into the plane to take off documents from the flight, then there is at least one mechanic who goes into the cockpit to check the flight logs and other technical things.  Then, if the plane arrived from an International port, it most probably will be visited by various agents of the Federal Inspection Service.  After it has its Federal Inspection, a cadre of "cleaners" will descend on the plane to clean out the debris that is left from the last group of passengers who may have endured up to nine, ten or more hours on that plane. There are other people who have access to all the different cavities of the plane, people who fuel the plane, clean out the lavatories, etc. During the cleaner's time on the plane they will climb all over the plane; vacuuming, sweeping, folding blankets, adding new pillows, cleaning out seat back pockets. And while they are doing this, one or two or more Catering Trucks will show up, with Caterer's agents taking off used carts from the galleys and replacing them with new carts full of fresh food for the outbound flight.  Are you getting the picture? The aircraft may even overnight or spend the day at the airport in a different location while it is waiting to go out on its next scheduled flight.  To ensure that it remains secure there will be security personnel to guard it, but that group is only as good as the integrity of the individuals.

At every turn, during each activity there is time and opportunity for any one of those people to do any number of activities that might go unnoticed.  You can use your imagination.  A plane is just too open and there are too many people with access to it!  Now, you may be asking why would people be working on planes in an Airport, if they were the kind of people that might compromise security? Well, ask yourself how easy is it to know another person's thoughts and intentions. No one really knows what another is planning, just like many airline related companies may not know the total history of people that they hire.

I was struck by something that was said on the news recently. A well known news reporter was relating how ironic it was that his sister who is a nun in Israel emailed him to ask if he was OK in the US, when usually it is the other way around.  We do not know who we have in our midst. No one would have guessed by that Reporter's ethnicity that he would have family in Israel.  That is the weakness of an open society. Anyone can be in this country and go anywhere. But that has also been one of our country's greatest strengths! So how can we make our planes secure?

What are the alternatives?

First you must identify the possible threats to Airline Safety.  What makes this so tough is that there are many.  From FOD (Foreign Object Damage) that might be deliberately left on a runway to sabotage a plane, to a bomb to blow it up, to guns/knives/nail files/boxcutters that might be used for high jacking..... the list goes on and on.  In many cases planes were sitting  wide open, empty and unsecured after the cleaners and others are finished, still hooked up to the jetway, sometimes for one hour or more before the flight begins to fill with new passengers. Anyone with a ramp pass can go on it, without being challenged. In the future a ramp pass will be much harder to get. Companies are suppose to do background checks of their employees and be able to certify that they know them.  This is very difficult, especially at airports which employ many people from other countries.  Finally, as of September, 2002 there has become a concerted effort to fire people who have been found to be illegal aliens working inside Airports.  

Let's look a little more closely at some of the above mentioned threats.  Bombs could be placed in any area which is out of sight, Cargo hold, Rest rooms, Food carts, one of possibly a hundred overhead compartments, galley compartments or closets in a good sized plane. Same goes for guns/knives that could be hidden in even smaller places, like seatback pockets, or taped under seats. This doesn't even address the shortcomings of the "Security Checkpoints" where passengers come through. As soon as we start looking harder at known dangers like scissors and nail files a person boards a plane with bombs in his shoes.  If we focus on shoes then someone will bring all the ingredients for a bomb and assemble it on the plane.  There is really no amount of technology that can detect everything, but there is nothing that can replace well seasoned intelligent people who can talk to passengers and look for discrepancies.  After you work at the Airport for a while you develop a sixth sense about things that are just not right. Maybe having the screeners apart of TSA a federal agency will translate into better security screening. If security people can be trained to develop this sixth sense, then we might be safer.

What then can be done to make our planes safer?

One really important improvement to airplane safety must be to have a very strong lock on the cockpit door.  This way no matter what happens outside the cockpit, as least the pilots will remain in control of the aircraft and hopefully be able to land the plane safely.  It also might be a good idea if the Federal Marshals who now fly on planes were pilots, as well.

One thing we must be careful not to do is to profile people.  It is not fair to people and it can lead us down a path where we will miss a real terrorist while we are busy pursuing the wrong person.  Remember that not all terrorists look the same.  Just when we think we have a profile of how we think they look, a person can appear who looks exactly opposite.  We must treat all passengers the same.  

Here are some suggestions:

1. Take a page out of El Al's manual and have Sky Marshals on each flight with loaded weapons.  This would help cut down on sky jacking, but would do nothing to stop a bomb from exploding in cargo holds below. Might be easier for Al El because they only have approximately 25 passenger aircraft, as opposed to the approximately 30,000 flights per day in the U.S.

2.  Also from El Al's operating procedures, we could have a guard in a vehicle at each plane, on the ramp, watching everyone who services the plane or even comes near it, so that people know they are being watched and that they might even be searched.

3. Make it mandatory that a full and true 10 year background check is made on every person who has access to any aircraft, or to the Airfield. Right now, most Airports ask the employing company to do the background check, but this may or may not be followed up. And there is no guarantee that the employer has actually done the check, or even has the inclination to do it. This leaves the true background of the individual up in the air. (no pun intended)

4. A guard be employed by the Airline who stays inside the Aircraft the entire time that it is on the ground, checks the plane for contraband, when it arrives and then watches during the time that it is being serviced.  This is a difficult one because with Airplanes larger than a 737s, (and even they are getting longer with the new 800 series,) it is almost impossible for one person to know what is going on inside a plane.  You would need several security people to watch, especially on a 747 with its upper deck.

5.  Every piece of luggage, cargo and mail that goes into the Cargo Holds would have to go through an x-ray screening the kind that can detect even plastic explosive.  Each cargo company will need extra people to possibly hand inspect cargo before it is allowed to go on a plane.  All couriers and cargo vehicles should be sealed at the company before it is allowed to leave to prevent something entering the Airport that should not enter. Those seals must be numbered and certified in some way so that the Airport Authority is able to verify their authenticity before the vehicle is allow to enter the airside operations area. 

6.  There would have to be bomb detector dogs checking the plane for explosives. But, l have heard there are even some types of explosives that even detector dogs might be able to sniff.

--  As you can see even an Airline that had employed the first 6 measures, wouldn't  have prevented what happened at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.  As we now know this was not a conventional bombing or  hijacking.  This was a very clever new event, turning the plane and its passengers into a bomb and driving it into a major landmark and symbol of our whole society and the free world. This plot was so clever that even Hollywood had not used it yet. So fresh an idea, that 50 or 80 people on the first two planes were over powered by several small knives and box cutters, because no one could have imagined that they were about to become part of this horrific attack. 

The reason the Terrorists were able to be so successful is that past incidents had shown that if people cooperated, less people got hurt.  Airline personnel were even trained that way because in the past it saved lives. From September 11th things will never be the same when it comes to people trying to take over a flight.  Passengers will no longer trust "Hijackers" and high jacking will not be tolerated.  If people sense that they are about to die anyway, no matter how much they cooperate, then they will do something, they have nothing to lose.  We know this is true, as that is what must have happened on the last flight hijacked that went nose into the ground, because the pilot and the people on board knew that their plane was on its way to kill more people, so they refused to let that happen by stopping in a field near Philadelphia.  This shows how things are already different.  People will not cooperate with highjackers. Pilot's Associations are urging the public not to cooperate with Terrorists. The people who fight back are true Heroes for saving lives on the ground.

--  As for the Security Checkpoints, employees will have to be paid more and get better training. They will have to adopt a no tolerance policy for guns, knives and bombs, no matter what their size. If a screener fails to see any of those things go through the x-ray machine they will have to go through rigorous re-training and then if it happens again that person will have to find a new job, because one gun or bomb that gets through is one too many. It has been reported that many of these mandatory tests at security checkpoints fail on a regular basis. There must be a zero tolerance for that, too. There should also be higher consequences for people who try to bring weapons through the Airport.
Right after 9/11 they were doing random security checks at the gates.  This was a very good idea for two reasons.  It shows if you have missed something back at Security and it also may stop a terrorist, if they were able to get through.  I am afraid as the time gets further and further away from 9/11 without a major incident that we will become complacent and even to the point of stopping the spot checks.  We should continue this, as it has been shown to catch things that slipped through.

Are all these measures going to put a strain on the Airline and the traveling public. Somewhat. Will they be worth it? Yes, if they will ensure that our skies are safer. Will I fly again soon? You bet, as soon as I have the time, because I believe in the power of travel to do good and enrich our lives. I also believe that things will tighten up and it will be one of the safest times to fly. The more we fly, the faster the industry and our country will come back to a new, safer kind of normal. The more experience the traveling public has with terrorism, the more savvy we will become and the harder it will be for terrorists to get the best of us.

P.S. This article was updated on October 3, 2002.  Since I wrote this article I have flown to Las Vegas, Paris and London.  All flights were good and I experienced very little inconvenience due to Security checks.  I urge everyone to travel as much as possible, as our major Airlines are in trouble and we don't want to lose all the wonderful choices we have for Air Travel.

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