Airline safety grounded in terra firma
In fact, only a rare trifecta of good fortune ensured that there were no fatalities on board the flydubai flight from Dubai to Israel, which resulted from the depredations of a suicidal Omani pilot with anti-Israeli inclinations. The courageous Captain Smit Machchhar, who, despite severe head injuries, managed to unlock the cockpit door and alert passengers to the crisis; a plumber who was familiar enough with aircraft controls to steady the plummeting aircraft because he closely followed Air Crash Investigation; and, finally, the presence of two off-duty pilots who took charge and made an emergency landing.
Many have drawn obvious parallels between the unforeseen exigency of a mentally disturbed pilot with murderous intentions against the mainly Israeli passengers on flight FZ1073 and the serial 9/11 hijackings by fundamentalists armed with box cutters. All of these crimes were designed as high-impact revenge against the country or countries that had launched an invasion against their own. A frisson of fear is now bound to travel through Israelis and their American allies about the wisdom of air travel. The flydubai near-tragedy showed how the gratuitous conflicts their governments started in West Asia have made the world unsafe for them (and unfortunate co-passengers of other nationalities). Those with longer memories will remember an earlier time in the 1970s when disaffected Palestinian guerrilla groups almost routinely hijacked airliners flying to or from Israel or the United States.
On September 6, 1970, for instance, Palestinian guerrillas hijacked four aircraft bound for New York in a coordinated action that shook the world — a TWA flight travelling from Frankfurt, El Al and Pan Am flights from Amsterdam, and a Swissair flight from Zurich. One of those hijackings failed thanks to the presence of mind of the pilot Uri Bar, though he is less remembered than the glamorous AK-47-wielding Leila Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and veteran of a 1969 hijacking. One of the aircraft was diverted to Beirut and two landed in Jordan, where they were surrounded by the Jordanian army. The PFLP was demanding the release of Palestinians held in Germany, Switzerland, England and Israel within 72 hours or they would kill all the hostages.
As the US flew in the 82nd Airborne and the Sixth Fleet was put on standby, the long standoff — which included the hijacking of a British Overseas Airways Corporation aircraft the next day — saw the outbreak of the famous “Black September” war between the Jordanian military and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation. It ended after Egypt’s Nasser Hussein brokered a deal that saw the hostages released and the hijackers set free.
Afterwards, American journalist Walter Cronkite presciently commented that the Palestinian guerrillas “thrust back to the world’s attention a problem diplomats have tended to shove aside …”
Two years later, Palestinian guerrillas hijacked a Sabena Air flight to Tel Aviv. It was during the rescue operation that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then a commando, gained fame for his heroics in foiling the plot. Four years later, he lost a brother in Operation Thunderbolt, when Israeli commandos famously stormed a hijacked Air France flight that was diverted to Entebbe, Uganda.
Back in India, little of this international drama registered on airport security. Air travel was rare in those days anyway, involving only a minuscule proportion of India’s population. Security checks mostly consisted of personnel perfunctorily checking hand luggage and occasionally asking if you were carrying knives or bombs. Children in those days freely visited the cockpit, where friendly pilots showed you the controls and gave you sweets. All that abruptly ended in 1985 when a bomb, planted by Punjab militants, exploded aboard the Emperor Kanishka, sending 329 people to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Metal detectors now made their presence felt and tarmac identification of checked-in luggage became the norm.
The IC 814 hijacking of 1999 — another casualty of botched diplomacy and intelligence — made baggage screening compulsory. After the 9/11 tragedies, cockpit doors were securely locked from the inside. Tragically, that policy sent 150 people plunging to their deaths when a mentally unhinged co-pilot locked his captain out of the cockpit and crashed Germanwings Flight 9525 into the French Alps in 2015. Passengers on flydubai flight FZ1073 may have suffered a similar fate were it not for Captain Machchhar.
The upshot of growing insecurity in the skies has been skyrocketing expenditure on security by airport operators. By one reckoning, security alone accounts for 20 per cent of airport operators’ expenditure. Some airports pass this cost on to passengers either wholly or partly. In short, air passengers pay for their security in the skies one way or another — even though, as Cronkite pointed out 56 years ago, the real solution lies in the hands of leaders and politicians on terra firma.
