A Pilot’s view of airport security

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Airline crews often feel safer flying into foreign airports, according to pilot Patrick Smith. He offers his take on the differences in airports worldwide to host Lisa Mullins. Download MP3

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Lisa Mullins: Patrick Smith is an airline pilot and a travel columnist. Patrick we just heard about a variety of security measures at airports around the world including the rather rigorous set of protocols in Israel. You fly for a major airline the name of which you cannot mention, but I wonder when you and your crew goes through security on a regular basis, where you feel the most comfortable with security measures?

Patrick Smith: Well I think aircrews want to see and feel the same things that any passenger does, which is they want to experience security that strikes them as efficient, reasonable, rational and effective. And I don’t know if we’re seeing that right now, certainly not here in the U.S. and maybe not globally either. I mean looking around the world and I travel to multiple countries every month, I see good and bad, but whatever measures we put in place short of turning airports into fortresses which unfortunately to some extent seems the direction we’re going. There’s always going to be a way around those measures by anybody who’s clever and resourceful enough, which brings us to another important point, which is that the real nuts and bolts of airport security come on off stage as it were. It’s the job of law enforcement and intelligence agencies, so CIA, FBI, Interpol, whatever. It’s not the job of the frontline airport screener to keep terrorists away from planes.

Mullins: But isn’t your comfort level a product of how secure the airport is that you’re being checked out, that you’re going through?

Smith: It is, but my comfort level is dependent not necessarily on things that I see in front of me. You know, how draconian a check-point is is not a measure necessarily of how efficient or how secure that check-point is.

Mullins: Why isn’t it?

Smith: Because we can create what we call a security theatre which is this presentation of security of being really tight, when in fact we’re focused on the wrong things and ignoring more important, more pressing threats.

Mullins: So you’re saying high tech doesn’t mean high efficiency?

Smith: Not necessarily, no.

Mullins: And so what does it mean? Assuming that it doesn’t always mean theatre, and even theatre can have an effect on certain perpetrators. But…

Smith: Well terrorism, terrorism itself is always been a very low tech. And I think it has to be a certain low-tech emphasis on stopping it. A lot of it maybe is just old fashioned gumshoe detective work.

Mullins: Well that’s what we’ve been relying on, I mean certainly for the bombs that were just discovered coming from Yemen. It was a tip off. It wasn’t the security apparatus that was able to infiltrate. Maybe go back to the story that we heard from India, where there was not a lot of technology but a lot of hands on patting down which is being objected too in some circles here in the United States. You’re saying that that might be more effective than all the big box checks here?

Smith: I think it’s effective as part of a bigger security program that takes in many different things, not all of which we see going on right in front of us.

Mullins: You’ve described airport security measures now as a kind of global arms race. What do you mean by that?

Smith: What I mean by that is after Richard Reed mere attack back at the end of 2001…

Mullins: It’s the shoe bomber?

Smith: The shoe bomber. You know, because of that everybody had to start taking their shoes off. And then we had the Christmas day underwear bomber last year, and because of that we’re basically stripped searched before we get on a plane, and it makes us ask ‘Well, what’s next?’ or ‘Have we reached the end?’ And that bounces us back to what I was saying earlier about there is always going to be a way to skirt the system, and we can’t have this mindset that we’re going to be 100 percent safe.

Mullins: Patrick, in closing, you’re talking to a lot of people who are going to be doing a lot of travelling over the holidays. Number one, can they really feel safe and secure given the systems in place? And, number two, what do you recommend for them overall?

Smith: Well there’s always going to be a threat, and at some point there is going to be another attack. But we need to accept that rationally and realize that, in spite of that, flying is still remarkably, astonishingly safe. Terrorist attacks against civilian air targets are; they’ve been fewer in the past 10 years or so than in any of the recent decades leading up to that. There is this idea which I think is media fueled to some extent that there are all these threats, and flying is more risky and dangerous, but really when you look at the numbers just the opposite is true.

Mullins: Airline pilot Patrick Smith, who writes the ‘Ask the Pilot’ column for Salon.com, nice to talk to you.

Smith: Thank you.

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