After several months of watching and reading hyperbolic reports about sharks, Gary Condit and a Michael Jordan return, it took a bunch of scum hijackers to bring a sense of proportion.
As I gazed about O’Hare International Airport, our new awakening, as well as our collective naivete, was capsulized by lines of travelers bending toward the horizon as they sought tickets and boarding passes at the main counters.
I was on my way back here to conclude a wonderfully varied eight-year tour of duty and mulling a final musing on Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Cokie Roberts, the Republican takeover of Congress, the war in Kosovo and Hillary Clinton becoming a U.S. senator–not to forget a team of 10-year-old soccer players who gave me infinite pleasure, if not infinite justice, far more pleasure than the mix of saints, sinners and hypocrites who passed before me professionally.
After circumventing a 4-hour-long line with the help of a kindly porter, I had time to waste at my gate. So I chatted up several pilots who gave me a depressing primer on a topic du jour, especially for publicity-craving committee chairmen in Washington, namely airport security.
“I told you so,” said one senior United Airlines pilot, summing up the view of colleagues and counterparts, such as an American Airlines pilot I subsequently interviewed.
“The general public perceives all this security–people checking out your nail clippers, watch fob, the metal in your shoes. But it’s all window dressing,” the United pilot said.
Window dressing. It’s a phrase the other pilot also used, finding it apt to describe security throughout the system, be it in and around terminals or inside aircraft.
The pilots, who asked that I not use their names, offered a depressing, oral excursion into airport safety. Lest I be charged with aiding and abetting Osama bin Laden, I will fudge a few details, because these guys were quite specific.
For starters, they scoffed at security involving the range of ground services, such as caterers and cleaners.
“A plane sits overnight and all these folks stick their umbilical cords into it,” a pilot said. “Heavens, just consider if you did have an inside man! Look at all the drugs smuggled in through inside people, like baggage handlers. An inside man is devastating.”
The initial layer of personnel with whom a traveler deals, be it ticket agents or the blue-jacketed security folks at the X-ray machines, tend to get mediocre wages and are often very stretched. Turnover is high, the pilots said, meaning that the institutional pride that breeds diligence and professionalism is waning, all the more so amid downsizing.
“More and more,” one pilot said, “you’ve got less experienced, young, poorly paid persons working in key personal-contact positions, observing passengers, seeing if anything seems at all suspicious.”
Thus, it’s no surprise that the pilots know what we all strongly suspect: Many of the security workers are jokes.
One pilot was decidedly unsettling as he discoursed on the ease of gaining access to supposedly off-limits areas using codes for the door locks around airports. He showed me exactly how one could find the numbers for loading bridges, terminal doors and individual gate ramps at various facilities.
If you had the will, it wouldn’t be hard to find the way to get those numbers.
Instead of that current system, the pilots suggested a more modern, swipe system with cards for those crews legitimately getting in and out, rather than a punch-the-numbers regime potentially broken even by bystanders looking at which numbers a pilot, attendant or gate agent punches.
For sure, the hijackings show the folly of what had been the hijacking paradigm for pilots. Until now, they’ve been trained largely in how to deal with more benign (relatively speaking) lawbreakers, namely those seeking specific political aims, like the release of buddies in jail, free passage to some country, a load of cash or all of the above.
“We know what to do with a Basque separatist trying to get some guys released or to get himself to Cuba,” a pilot said. “We just make sure not to piss him off. Stall him and keep the plane on the ground.”
The pilots’ instructions thus urge them to be cockpit Oprahs, exhibiting calm and empathy, all along trying to talk down the nut cases.
Now one has the specter of terrorists who don’t even fit the traditional profile of some very young, single, Middle Eastern zealot.
It’s all the more reason, the pilots said, to look inside the plane, especially those cheap cockpit doors, which any 10-year-old aspiring Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris can kick in, assuming they’re even locked.
Inside that cockpit is the current anti-hijacking device, namely a crash ax. It’s a fairly heavy steel fireman’s ax to be used to smash open a panel, window or door.
Pilots say that’s of scant help in situations like the ones on Sept. 11. One pilot groused about being unable to carry a gun or at least make sure there’s a gun-toting marshal around all the time. The mere prospect of armed resistance might be a deterrent.
They gave other examples, all of which I had in mind as I got onto a Chicago-to-Baltimore flight (which was half-filled, presumably because of the absurd lines of people unable to get their ticket and boarding pass).
I opened a newspaper to short biographies of World Trade Center victims. There was a 32-year-old Hawaiian-born woman who, according to a friend of mine who works in the Senate press gallery, interned for her 10 years earlier.
The young woman was a hotshot pastry chef who was planning to leave her job at Windows on the World to start her own shop. The restaurant manager had beseeched her to hold off until he could replace her. That’s the only reason she was there that morning.
As I finished her tale, a flight attendant gave our predeparture safety seminar. As I looked up, I saw what struck me as especially absurd in the context of recent events: instructions on how to buckle a seat belt.
The flight was uneventful, and I returned to a city with roadblocks around the Pentagon, tons of American flags and a steady hum of planes, helicopters and fighter jets buzzing around. And there were those affected by a change in the whole legislative landscape.
A political consultant stopped me on the street Friday to moan about his plans for a tax-exempt fund to rally opposition to a missile defense system.
“So much for that idea!” he said, knowing that President Bush will now likely get most everything he wants short of erecting mile-high radar atop every McDonald’s or sticking missile silos in the parking lot of the Mormon Tabernacle.
My prime observation is of a steady community marked by the confounding reserve of so many Washingtonians. It might be a function of a Southern culture melded with the low-key impulses of a town built around a bureaucracy.
Not many highs and lows here.
As one of those choppers could be heard in the distance, people were lining up for a showing of “Funny Girl” with Barbra Streisand.
A Washington Post friend and his wife said a bridal expo they attended (their daughter had just told them she was engaged) was absolutely packed.
We had an office party Friday for a TV colleague who is leaving and expects to give birth to her first child soon.
My favorite Pan-Asian joint has been packed most nights.
Even if terrorists strike again, the British experience suggests an impressive adaptability, not just during the Blitz of World War II but in the many years of Northern Ireland-related terrorism.
If needed, we’ll be the same.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Israeli prime minister, said here Friday that Sept. 11 represents a “hinge of history.” And he might be correct. But life does go on.
I’ve got Green Bay over Washington on Monday night.
