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When you walk into a bank, you often pass an armed security guard. Peering down from the ceiling, at least two video cameras monitor your activities. Behind the counters, tellers have panic buttons to alert police to a robbery. And often the money itself is packed with a dye that can explode and stain the bills and robbers as they make their escape, making it easier to identify them and harder to spend their loot. All are widely accepted steps, not only prudent but generally mandatory.
So why shouldn't a commercial airliner enjoy equal technological protection? That's a question many people are asking now that the glaring weakness in aviation security have emerged after the hijacking of four planes, two of which leveled the World Trade Center towers in lower Manhattan. It is also one with a relatively easy answer: While no one claims it's easy to stop a hijacking, most experts agree that many steps could be taken to solve such crimes and improve the chances of crews and passengers surviving.
SENTINELS OF THE SKIES. Not all the solutions are high-tech. Airlines have put armed guards on planes in times of high alerts. Israel's El Al and Arabic airlines do it regularly, if not on every flight. A trained, trusted armed presence on any airline would make it potentially harder for hijackers to assume control. It could be an armed guard, say, or an armed flight crew, according to Barnes McCormick, a professor of aerospace engineering at Penn State University.
Perhaps equally effective and with less potential for damage, since gunfights at 30,000 feet could easily result in a plane crash, would be antipersonnel mechanisms such as pepper spray. "You have six or seven crew people. If each one is equipped with pepper spray, and one or two of these people are able to deploy pepper, you might have a different situation," says a security specialist who heads a group that trains police and others in airport security procedures. Pepper spray would easily trump box-cutters, the weapons reportedly used to hijack the planes last week.
How about video monitoring? Think about it: While it's now routine in convenience stores, it doesn't exist in the air. For pilots, cameras might provide a valuable way to gain information about the state of the cabin without leaving the cockpit. This same video could be beamed to the ground, making it easily retrievable (unlike the little flight-recorder box).
BEAM ME DOWN. Boeing, through it's Connexion initiative, is aiming to provide broadband in-flight communications on commercial flights. How much additional bandwidth would be required to beam a small-footprint video signal back to the ground? Not a whole lot compared with what's needed to provide hundreds of passengers with high-speed data communications.
That would give pilots, flight controllers, and experts on the ground a better idea of what's happening in the cabin. Even if hijackers managed to disable the camera, at least investigators would have a visual recording of what transpired and a look at the hijackers. That information might not save victims, but it could contribute to bringing terrorists and the organizations that support them to justice more swiftly.
True, installing video cameras might raise hackles with pilot and flight-attendant unions over privacy concerns. But the invasion would be minimal and not all that different from the millions of employees who have large portions of their workplace under surveillance.
What about panic buttons that either the pilot or crew could push to alert authorities -- and perhaps security personnel on the plane -- that a hijacking was under way? Installing such switches certainly wouldn't cost that much. Again, they might not save lives on the planes. But such a warning device might give the law-enforcement officials precious time in which to respond to an attack -- and possibly prevent a plane being turned into a guided missile.
TELLTALE SIGNS. On the more exotic high-tech end, pattern-recognition technology could be adapted to spot threats at the security checkpoints. This is the same software that drives facial-recognition technology. But it can also be used not only to track faces but also to scan images for suspect patterns, such as sharp edges, or bulges in luggage or beneath clothes. The latest generation of airport-detection systems can already be used to spot plastic knives or other items that might elude standard metal detectors.
"If images are being fed back to a typical monitor today for humans to study, you could set up a program to look for certain patterns, or have it look at the size and the density of the pattern," says David Teitelbaum, the CEO of biometric-technology outfit eTrue. Furthermore, linking these detectors to pattern-recognition software that parses images for weapons could automate the process and, at the same time, speed up and improve security checks.
To be sure, engineering changes into airplanes is never simple. All planes are designed to weight and size specifications that can make altering them difficult. Heavy steel doors to better keep hijackers out of the cockpit sound practical -- until you realize it might add a great deal of weight to a plane, explains McCormick.
Furthermore, Federal Aviation Administration safety requirements can work against security. The FAA mandates that flight crews keep their door locked during flights. But, a Boeing spokesperson says, the FAA also requires that cockpit doors should be easy to kick in if an emergency requires either rapid entry or exit.
ZERO TOLERANCE. Finally, none of these changes will work without a commitment to better enforce existing security measures. "When a person is found in a restricted area without ID," says Boyd, "they shouldn't be escorted off -- they should be immediately arrested."
With stepped-up vigilance, adding some of these simple precautions could gain precious seconds of response time and expand the options of crews and passengers alike. Would these steps have prevented the Sept. 11 attack? That's impossible to say and futile to ponder at this point. But giving a plane at least the same security as a bank might be a good starting point.
Salkever is technology editor for BusinessWeek Online Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
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Copyright 2001 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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