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the intentional destruction of aircraft in flight is not novel in the United States; according to the
database maintained at
www.airdisaster.com
, at least four U.S. civil airliners have been bombed
in American airspace, and at least one was crashed due to the actions of a disgruntled former
pilot. In recent years, policy makers in the aviation security domain could draw upon experience
in policy making that followed the PAA 103 and TWA 800 events, both of which were
characterized both by advocacy for greater aviation security and by arguments about cost-benefit
analysis, the actual risk of terrorism, and the appropriate role of government in what was at least
believed to be a private industry (substantial government subsidies notwithstanding). All these
arguments were revisited after September 11.
The second reason why we can argue that the PAA and TWA events were “rehearsals” for
post September 11 policy is the incremental nature of aviation safety and security policy.
Aviation safety and security policy does not change in leaps and bounds. Rather, because of the
rapid accumulation of knowledge about major and minor operational issues and problems in
aviation (Perrow, 1999), operators and regulators are able to rather quickly learn from and
address problems as experience is gained. Criminal and terrorist threats to aviation are also dealt
with incrementally, as policies were enacted to address the most recent sort of threats: criminal
hijackings of airplanes for “transportation” purposes, to terrorist attacks for extortion and
blackmail (St. John, 1989), to the current environment of bombings and suicide attacks that use
planes as weapons in pursuit of political goals.
So, while September 11 created sweeping change in aviation security policy it is, as I will
show here, safe to say that post-September 11 policy making could draw on a rich history of
efforts to improve policy, and a history of incremental policy that in some ways improved
security and in other ways failed to do so, as evidenced by the attacks themselves.
Al-Qaida’s expected retaliation for the U.S. cruise missile attack against al-Qaida’s training
facilities in Afghanistan on August 20, 1998, could take several forms of terrorist attack in the
nation’s capital. Al-Qaida could detonate a Chechen-type building-buster bomb at a federal
building. Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida’s Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an
aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House. Ramzi Yousef had planned to do this
against the CIA headquarters.
See Hudson, 1999.
Convention