The inherent danger of flying

Shoe bombs and suicidal 15-year-olds are heightening fears about airline security. But aside from creating more chaos at airports, what can we do?

By P. Smith

Jan 15, 2002 | As airplane nuts in junior high school, my friends and I spent virtually every weekend between Grades 7 and 9 roaming the terminals of Boston's Logan International Airport. I came to know that airport with as much intimacy as I knew my own house. From the 16th-story observation deck of Logan's control tower, equipped with binoculars and notebooks, we logged the registration numbers of arriving and departing jetliners. "Plane spotting," it was called.

But I'll admit that since we were kids on the verge of our teens, these innocent pursuits sometimes gave way to pranks and unauthorized snooping. Logan became a kind of amusement park of harmless but dastardly challenges. We would ride the luggage belts into the airside tarmac areas. We crawled through hatchways, sneaked into elevator shafts and fire escapes. At one point we knew the doorway combination codes to several of Logan's most secure areas, our intelligence gathered simply by spying on employees as they punched in the digits.

Our most cherished activity, though, was gaining access to the airplanes themselves, something we did routinely and with hardly a suspicious glance from guards or employees. We would pass through security and stake out the gate of an arriving flight. Then we'd ask an agent or crew member if we could take a peek at the cockpit. Or, more daringly, when all passengers had disembarked, we would simply walk down the enclosure and step aboard unseen. On some occasions we were told to go ahead, unsupervised, often by the captain himself: "Just don't monkey around with anything."

We would roam the cockpits and aisles, helping ourselves to cans of soda, magazines, passenger briefing cards, playing cards -- whatever souvenirs we wanted. At the very least, cordial captains would give us tours, both inside and out, of all our favorite planes. Once, as eighth-graders, two friends and I spent more than a full hour in the cockpit of one major airline's DC-10 parked at the gate, utterly unbeknownst to a single person besides us. Finally a mechanic came aboard for a routine check and found us in the pilots' chairs, seat belts on, pretending to be airborne over the Atlantic somewhere.

This was the late 1970s. The threat of terrorism, mind you, was not some nascent fear in people's minds, but as real and frequent a phenomenon then as today, if not more so. For the sake of precedent, one might recall that on a single day in September 1970, four New York-bound passenger jets were hijacked simultaneously by Palestinian terrorists and blown up (albeit after the release of the passengers).

Our memories seem unfortunately short, outrage not brought on until fireballs and a high death count are televised. Now, in the wake of the sad death of 15-year-old Charles Bishop, the student pilot who, just last week, stole a single-engine Cessna and flew it into the side of a Tampa skyscraper, a new round of outrage and furor has erupted, this time over an apparent lack of security in the low-profile, low-security world of general aviation. The incident, with its eerie copycat blueprint of the September attacks, has some people reeling, calling for the tightening of airspace restrictions and the battening down of small-town airfields.

Did you know there are 600,000 licensed pilots in the United States? Did you know there are thousands of small airplanes housed at thousands of small airports across the country, many of which are flyable by novices with little skill or experience? And many of these are tied down on unsecured grass fields, their engines startable with the flip of a switch. Not even a key is required. Do we ground them all? Do we station the National Guard at small, single-runway airstrips around the nation?

There's a beautiful -- and perhaps instructive -- element of poetic futility to the idea of securing the very air above our heads. Some are proposing cockpit technology that would make it impossible to fly airliners into restricted and prohibited airspace. Another suggestion is to make jets landable by remote control in the event of a hijacking. Perhaps we can string enormous nets over our cities, military bases and power plants, the way London proposed protecting itself from Nazi bombardment during the Blitz.

Let us stop instead, and catch our breaths.

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