WASHINGTON (Knight Ridder Newspapers) -- The terrorists who attacked America on Tuesday by turning jumbo jets into giant bombs did so by getting through airport security and sneaking weapons aboard four airliners that took off within 12 minutes of each other.
If the pilots were killed or otherwise incapacitated, it would be relatively simple to steer a jumbo jet into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, aviation and security experts said. The apparently coordinated attacks exploited an obvious weakness in America's flight system, which was geared more toward finding bombs than preventing hijacking, they said.
"The aircraft itself became the bomb, and therefore a lot of the effort we had been putting into attempting to detect explosives, bombs and the like would have had no impact here," said Douglas Harris, the chairman of the security consulting firm Anacapa Sciences in Santa Barbara, Calif., and a former member of a National Academies of Sciences study on airport security.
"You could get enough weaponry on board (an airplane) until you can take control of the airplane," said Eric Doten, a former senior Federal Aviation Administration adviser who's now director of the Center for Aerospace Safety Education at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida.
Most likely the terrorists smuggled plastic or composite weapons through the metal detectors that passengers pass through, Doten said.
Over the next few days and weeks, investigators will try to find out how the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were staged, but aviation and security experts already were able to identify holes in America's safety and aviation system that allowed the attacks to occur.
In fact, the Department of Transportation's inspector general started an investigation Monday -- the day before the attacks -- "to assess FAA's efforts for improving passenger and carryon bagging screening at security checkpoints within the United States," according to an internal DOT memo. This came nearly two years after the inspector general warned the FAA of lax airport security, saying it "has been slow to take actions necessary to strengthen access control."
That November 1999 report found that the inspector general's pretend-hijackers "successfully penetrated secure areas by: piggybacking (following) employees through the doors; riding unguarded elevators; walking through the concourse doors, gates, and jetbridges, walking through cargo facilities unchallenged; and driving through unmanned vehicle gates."
FAA spokesman Les Dorr said his agency doesn't comment on specific security issues, and he referred questions to the inspector general.
"Maybe we're too complacent," said retired Air Force Col. Dale Oderman, an aviation technology professor at Purdue University in Indiana. "Most airport security is fairly primitive in the sense of what it can do. We can get a whole lot more technological in the machines we use for security, but they cost so darn much."
"It's not too surprising, because the one thing that we know is that even with the most alert checkpoints and the most alert crews we have, the probabilities of (weapon) detection are not high, unfortunately," said Harris of Anacapa Sciences. "Because we haven't had a hijacking in some time in this country, that kind of lulls you."
"You can sneak things through that would allow you to pull something like this off," Doten said. "The systems are such that you can definitely get life-threatening devices on airplanes."
Government officials "certainly have been worried about it, but to my knowledge they haven't been able to come up with something to detect these composite devices," Doten said. "I've always been convinced that if somebody wants to do it bad enough that they could do it."
There are technologies that detect some plastic or non-metal weapons, Purdue's Oderman said. InVision Technologies of Newark, Calif., has sold more than 100 such devices to the FAA. But they cost about $1 million and are fairly slow, so they aren't used much, he said.
The underpaid airport worker is another potential security loophole. After TWA Flight 800 exploded off Long Island, N.Y., in 1996, University of Portland business professor Richard Gritta checked the background screening of lower-level airport workers and found "pretty minimal security on people hired."
Once the terrorists got their weapons on board the jets Tuesday, the experts theorized, they had to kill or incapacitate the pilots, because trained pilots would not steer jets into the buildings such as the World Trade Center or the Pentagon.
"I have to assume that the pilots were no longer a factor; they were either shot or killed somehow," Oderman said.
If the terrorists had just a little bit of training, even just in a simulator, they could have steered an airborne jet into a building, Doten said.
They would have had to be able to control the jet's yoke, which moves it left and right and up and down, and its thruster for power, Doten said. But they wouldn't have had to do the toughest thing: land the jet. |
