Re: "Ben Gurion Official Highlights Airport Security Layers"
- From: mike <yard22192@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 11:34:23 -0800 (PST)
The New York Times
December 28, 1985, Saturday, Late City Final Edition
FOR EL AL, VIGILANCE AGAINST VIOLENCE
BYLINE: By RICHARD WITKIN
SECTION: Section 1; Page 4, Column 3; Foreign Desk
El Al Israel Airlines maintains the tightest security of any airline
in the Western world, most security specialists agree.
This has minimized incidents of in-flight hijacking and sabotage, but
it has not totally prevented them. And terrorists also have been able,
since the late 1960's, to carry out sporadic on-the-ground attacks on
El Al passengers, crew members and aircraft that have caused
considerable death, injury and destruction.
A close call came in August 1972 when an explosive device went off in
the baggage hold of an El Al Boeing 707 that had taken off from Rome,
bound for Tel Aviv with 140 passengers and eight crew members.
Officials of the airline said the plane's baggage hold had been
reinforced with armor plating. This precaution apparently limited the
damage to a six-inch-wide hole in the compartment and a small crack in
the rear door. The plane returned safely to Rome.
El Al officials are extremely reluctant to go into detail about their
much-admired security system. So it can only be assumed that some if
not all other El Al planes have been similarly reinforced to limit the
effects of cargo-hold explosions. Furthermore, El Al planes are
reliably reported to have devices under their wings to protect against
surface-to-air missiles by altering their flight through electronic or
other means. So far as is known, no ther airline uses such devices.
One Successful Hijacking
Evidently the only time an El Al plane has been successfully hijacked
was in 1968, when members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine commandeered a plane and directed the crew to land in
Algeria. The incident ended without injury. Two years later, Israeli
air marshals overpowered two Arabs, one a woman, who tried to take
over a plane bound from Amsterdam to New York. The plane landed in
London with the male hijacker dead from a bullet fired during the
aerial gun battle.
The worst airport loss suffered by El Al took place in May 1972.
Twenty-six passengers were killed and 76 wounded in an attack by
members of the Japanese Red Army organization at Ben-Gurion
International Airport outside Tel Aviv.
At least seven other attacks on El Al personnel or property between
1968 and the double assault yesterday resulted in loss of life. They
included the tossing of a hand grenade into an airline office in
Athens in 1969 in which a boy was killed and 14 others wounded, and a
1976 attack on a plane preparing to take off from Istanbul in which 4
died and 21 were wounded.
Risk Greater at Big Terminals
The consensus among security experts yesterday, after the airport
attacks in Rome and Vienna, was that El Al, like any other airline,
was especially vulnerable to attack where all the carriers have
counter space in one sprawling building and local authorities must
provide security for an area that may be filled with hundreds or even
thousands of people.
''In Israel, they have total control over their airport,'' said the
former security chief of a major American carrier. ''But outside
Israel, they must defer to foreign governments.
''If someone wants to come into a terminal shooting, there's nothing
an individual airline can do,'' he said. ''This is not true in Israel.
But what can they do in a place like Rome? El Al is victimized there
as much as anyone.''
For travelers who have flown on El Al, memories of the trip usually
include a baggage inspection and an interrogation that are remarkably
thorough.
Questions in 'Great Detail'
Two young American women were not allowed aboard a New York-to-Tel
Aviv flight early this month until the stepmother of one was called by
an El Al security officer five minutes before takeoff time to verify
the passengers' account of their reasons for going to Israel.
Linda Stewart, whose stepdaughter Jennifer was one of the two bluejean-
clad travelers (the other was Katie Leachman), said yesterday:
''The man from security went into great detail. He wanted to know what
university Jenny had gone to, the purpose of the trip, how long she
had known Katie. He was very polite and ended up thanking me and
adding that they were just checking. I didn't know whether to be
reassured or scared out of my socks.''
Two other travelers who went to and from Tel Aviv not long ago told of
interrogations at the Israeli airport that lasted 45 minutes.
Among the questions frequently asked are: whether the passenger
personally did the packing; whether anyone else had access to the
luggage; whether it contained electronic devices and, if so, where
they had been bought, and whether the passenger was carrying a package
received from someone else.
Baggage Depressurized
Security experts, declining to be quoted by name, said El Al took
precautions that appear to go beyond those of many if not most other
carriers. They said that such precautions were understandable because
El Al represents a nation that is under constant siege from
guerrillas, and emphasized that they were feasible because El Al
operates only a fraction of the flights of the industry's giants.
El Al passengers are routinely told they must report to the airport at
least two and a half hours before scheduled departures to allow time
for security procedures.
Baggage destined for the cargo hold is generally given a thorough
initial search. In addition, the bags and other cargo are placed
inside armored altitude chambers, from which the air is pumped out to
simulate the drop in atmospheric pressure as a plane gains altitude.
The purpose is to double check that the bags do not contain an
explosive rigged to go off when the pressure drops.
Use of magnetometers and X-ray machines to check for weapons on a
passenger's body or in carry-on luggage is conducted with great care.
And the magnetometer check often is supplemented by frisking.
Separate Security at Kennedy
Seven years ago, at Kennedy International Airport, El Al began using a
new check-in terminal of its own that is separated by walls from the
check-in counters of other foreign carriers in the International
Arrival Building. The El Al area is known to have special security
features, but an official of the airline declined to discuss them
except to say, ''In effect we have our own security at Kennedy.''
The implication was that the Kennedy set-up was far preferable to that
at other airports like Rome's, where the check-in counters are not
isolated from those of other airlines and are vulernable to attack
from whoever gains access to the general terminal area.
The security situation for El Al differs from airport to airport,
depending partly on the degree of special assistance the airline can
obtain from local authorities. In Switzerland, for instance,
passengers departing on El Al flights are processed and boarded at
relatively isolated areas of the terminal.
One security expert suggested that authorities consider screening
passengers, as well as companions seeing them off, at checkpoints set
up at the entrance to a terminal.
.
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