Airline Safety
Are financial problems causing U.S. airlines to cut corners?
By Richard L. Worsnop

Airline executives contend that declining accident statistics prove that flying is safer than ever. However, a number of analysts say aviation safety is eroding as the struggling major carriers cut corners on maintenance, safety inspections and pilot training. Some observers blame deregulation of commercial air transportation in 1978 for today's financial woes. They also argue that the nation's air-. . . .

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Has airline deregulation hurt air safety?

Ralph Nader , Wesley J. Smith Nader is the founder of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen; Smith is an author, lecturer and attorney,. From Collision Course: The Truth About Airline Safety, 1993.	Paul Sheehan Sheehan is a U.S.-based Australian journalist who studied the American airline industry under a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. From The Atlantic, August 1993.

Dealing With the Threat of Terrorism

On Nov. 1, 1955, an explosion ripped apart a United Air Lines plane above Longmont, Colo., killing all 39 passengers and five crew members. Among the dead was Daisie C. King, 55. Her son, John Gilbert Graham, 23, had bought $37,500 worth of insurance on her life from an airport vending machine. He also had placed a dynamite time-bomb in her suitcase.

Graham's confession two weeks later created a sensation, and not just because his crime involved matricide. '

Difficult, perhaps, but not impossible. Consider the midair explosion that destroyed Pan American World Airways Flight 103 as it passed over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988. All 259 persons aboard the plane were killed, as well as 11 Lockerbie residents who were struck by falling debris.

Even now, despite an investigation by a presidential commission, key circumstances surrounding the blast remain murky. Authorities believe - though they are not absolutely sure - that the bomb was made of Semtex, a powerful plastic explosive. They also believe the explosive substance was hidden inside a portable radio packed in a suitcase that was loaded onto the plane in Frankfurt, West Germany. Unlike a simple dynamite bomb like Graham's, Semtex is virtually undetectable by standard baggage-screening machinery.

The identity of the person or persons who dropped off the bomb- carrying baggage is still unknown. According to the presidential investigative panel, Pan Am personnel did not reconcile the number of bags placed on any of the carrier's planes leaving Frankfurt with the number of passengers who actually boarded those planes. Consequently, “When Flight 103 backed away from the gate in Frankfurt, Pan Am security personnel did not know whether or not it was carrying an ‘extra' bag.” “”

One lesson to be drawn from the 1955 and 1988 disasters is that threats to airline security and safety are constantly evolving, forcing the carriers to play a never-ending game of catchup.

“Tightening security only in some regions creates incentives for terrorist activity to move to other locations,” according to the authors of a recent book on aviation safety. “Other steps may serve more to relocate terrorism, for example, from the aircraft to the terminal, or change its form rather than ... reduce it.”

[1] ">Graham was convicted of murder and executed in January 1957.

Footnote: 1. ">Graham was convicted of murder and executed in January 1957.

[2] ">Libya, suspected of orchestrating the bombing of Flight 103, is thought to have stockpiled tons of Semtex, obtained from the former communist state of Czechoslovakia, according to U.S. officials.

Footnote: 2. ">Libya, suspected of orchestrating the bombing of Flight 103, is thought to have stockpiled tons of Semtex, obtained from the former communist state of Czechoslovakia, according to U.S. officials.

[3] ">Report of the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, May 15, 1990, p. 18.

Footnote: 3. ">Report of the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, May 15, 1990, p. 18.

[4] ">Ibid., p. ii.

Footnote: 4. ">Ibid., p. ii.

[5] ">According to the Report of the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, at least six U.S. aircraft have been sabotaged in the United States since the 1955 explosion over Colorado, including two serious incidents: the 1960 dynamiting of a National Airlines plane over North Carolina, in which 34 people died, and the 1962 dynamiting of a Continental Air Lines plane over Missouri, killing 45 persons.

Footnote: 5. ">According to the Report of the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, at least six U.S. aircraft have been sabotaged in the United States since the 1955 explosion over Colorado, including two serious incidents: the 1960 dynamiting of a National Airlines plane over North Carolina, in which 34 people died, and the 1962 dynamiting of a Continental Air Lines plane over Missouri, killing 45 persons.

[6] ">Clinton V. Oster Jr., et al., Why Airplanes Crash: Aviation Safety in a Changing World (1992), p. 155.

Footnote: 6. ">Clinton V. Oster Jr., et al., Why Airplanes Crash: Aviation Safety in a Changing World (1992), p. 155.