Air travel has changed a lot since the days of Alcock and Brown. Gone are the open cockpits, goggles, Biggles type hats and scarves. If those guys could come back for a visit and see how aviation has changed, I imagine that the shock would probably send them straight back to whatever heavenly runway they came from. It’s impressive the way some of these monsters can even get off the ground.
It’s the same thing with the cruise liners. Some of these ships, like the Caribbean Princess, have the bones of three and a half thousand people on board. That Princess has nineteen decks, a crew of twelve hundred, five swimming pools, a couple of movie theatres, several night clubs and numerous restaurants and bars. It’s nearly a thousand feet long for God’s sake so how can it possibly stay afloat? When it berths at the quayside in Cobh it dominates the landscape. Yet it just sits there in all its glory, on a small body of water, and waits, without sinking. It’s a remarkable sight.
Flying made easy
Anyway, whatever about ships, Alcock and Brown would also be surprised at the amount of traffic in the sky these days. If you spend a few hours in Sydney or Heathrow Airport and just watch the flights coming and going you’d wonder how it is possible to have so many planes in the sky at one time without smashing into each other. Even sitting in a plane at Heathrow waiting in the queue to depart is an eye opener. They really operate on a very tight schedule. Yet, in spite of all that, it remains one of the safest forms of transport. So we’re told.
Commercial flying has gone through a few changes over the years. What began as a complicated business soon became a lot more straightforward and user friendly. You purchased a ticket, handed in your luggage, got a boarding pass, went through minimal security and boarded the plane. Suddenly we were all flying to holiday destinations for a few weeks in the sun. Then when we thought that it couldn’t get any easier we were introduced to online booking and online check- in. Getting a flight became as simple as catching a taxi or a train.
It was too good to last so it didn’t. Along came 9/11 and that changed everything. That and other acts of terror since then have made life much more difficult for the air traveller. Security checks are intensive and time consuming. I’m all in favour of airport security and I’m happy to see it. I am much more comfortable sitting next to a guy when I can be reasonably confident he doesn’t have a Kalashnikov or an AK47 in his hold-all or a hundred weight of Semtex tucked into his underpants.
It’s starting to get complicated
But the security confuses me. If it is absolutely necessary to take off your shoes, belt and watch for a proper security check then let’s do it. Let’s all sing from the one hymn sheet. Then every time we approach the security table we can all place these items in the tray. We’ll all be prepared so it will probably save us some time in the long run. But this isn’t the case. Sometimes you will be asked to remove one of the items while on other occasions you will be asked to remove everything and in some cases you won’t be required to remove anything.
If these checks are so revealing and so important why aren’t we all subjected to them on every occasion? If I have to take my shoes off in Dublin then why don’t I have to take them off in Heathrow or vice versa? If it’s just certain passengers that are chosen at random for these checks then is that really good enough? Despite all we know about security and all the intelligence we have on terrorists and other criminals there are still a few nutters that slip the net. There is no system in place that can be completely fool proof as long as you have characters that are prepared to sacrifice their lives for their allocation of virgins in another dimension.
Are we safe?
Security measures will be effective against the guy who doesn’t want to get caught and will act as a good deterrent. But they are less effective against someone who is not worried about being caught or someone who is happy to die for his particular cause.
We have seen in the past that there are the occasional slip ups in airport security. Recently there was a guy who had a selfie taken with some disturbed passenger that was hijacking a plane to go to Larnaka in Cyprus to visit a female like a love sick puppy. As is happened it all turned out ok but it could just as easily have gone pear shaped if he had been a genuine terrorist.
There isn’t much we can do about it if we find ourselves in that situation. Having a photo taken with Mr. Terrorist wouldn’t be high on my list of priorities. Rooting out the life jacket from under my seat at 30,000 feet wouldn’t necessarily fill me with confidence either. Beating him to a pulp appeals to me but then if he was armed with something that would make a loud bang and split the plane in two, then that course of action might be counterproductive.
Flying might be as safe as they say it is but maybe I should just start using one of those cruise liners instead. At least if I ran into a terrorist on one of those I wouldn’t have far to fall and the life jacket would probably be a lot more useful in the water than it would be up in the clouds.