Aviation Terrorism
| Author | George Kurian |
| Pages | 96-99 |
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Aviation is an ineluctably international industry. Airports connect the world, and thousands of flights leave the United States and other countries each day bound for international destinations. Indeed, the degree to which the world is a global community is dependent on aviation. The global aviation industry moves some two billion people each year with a fleet of nearly 18,000 aircraft. Studies of global aviation's worldwide growth potential, even allowing for business downturns, project that the number of passengers will double by 2015.
The hijacking of an airplane has been described as the most dramatic and visible form of terrorism. High-profile hijackings allow terrorists to garner worldwide attention, as well as the opportunity to inflict a large number of casualties. However, the threat of aviation terrorism encompasses more than just hijackings. Over the last decades of the twentieth century, aviation-related terrorism evolved, and terrorists became much more deadly. In 2001 the United States experienced the horrors of aviation terrorism firsthand.
At about 8:00 A.M. on September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 took off from Boston's Logan International Airport bound for Los Angeles with eighty-one passengers and a crew of eleven. Shortly after Flight 11 left Boston, United Airlines Flight 175 also departed Boston for Los Angeles carrying fifty-six passengers and nine crewmembers. Neither of these flights would reach Los Angeles. At 8:46 A.M., American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Less than twenty minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 hit the World Trade Center's south tower. The two attacks resulted in the deaths of about 2,750 people.
About a half hour after the second plane hit the World Trade Center, a third hijacked plane, American Airlines Flight 77 from Dulles International Airport in Virginia, crashed into the west side of the Pentagon building near Washington, D.C., killing everyone on board the plane and 125 people on the ground. A fourth hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 93, heading to San Francisco from Newark International Airport in New Jersey, crashed at about 10:00 A.M. in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all on board. All four planes had been hijacked in a premeditated terrorist attack that caught the United States by surprise. Nearly 3,000 people lost their lives in the series of four coordinated attacks of aviation terrorism on 9/11.
Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, government officials from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) went on the defensive, expressing the impossibility of predicting the incidents that occurred that day. Despite the shock that many government officials, along with most American citizens, felt after the attacks, the idea of using planes as missiles was neither outlandish nor novel. As recently as 1994, an Air France flight destined for Marseille was halted when French authorities received intelligence indicating that someone intended to fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower in Paris. In 1993 a small airplane was stolen and crashed into the west side of the White House. Two decades earlier, in 1970, Israel downed a Libyan airliner after receiving information that the plane was going to be used as a missile for a suicide mission.
Only months before the attacks of September 11, 2001, the FAA had conducted an experiment at domestic airports designed to increase aviation security and reduce
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the rate of lost and misrouted baggage. The experiment, known as Positive Passenger-Bag Match (PPBM), was based on the premise that bags checked in by passengers before takeoff could be identified if the passenger did not board the flight. It was hoped that this experiment would prevent acts of aviation terrorism where terrorists checked a bomb disguised as luggage, and simply did not board the flight. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, it was generally assumed that aviation terrorists were not suicidal. The 9/11 attacks invalidated this idea, and further illustrated that aviation terrorism is a...
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