Sunday, July 31, 2011

Post 9/11: Uneasiness lingers for plane crews and travelers alike

Air Line Pilots Association

United Capt. Steve Derebey was en route from Cleveland to Chicago when the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York. "It's not something that ever goes away," he said. "I think about it every time I fly."

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The first clue came in a short radio message from a United Airlines dispatcher.

Make sure the cockpit door is secure.

“I called the flight attendant and said ‘Is everything OK in back?’” Capt. Steve Derebey said in a recent interview about flying on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. “She responded that everything was completely normal.”

But when Derebey touched down at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport after the 80-minute trip from Cleveland, he learned from the gate agent that things were anything but normal.

American Airlines Flight 11 had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. Minutes later, Derebey, squeezed into the crowd around a large-screen TV at an airport bar — all terminal televisions had been shut off — saw United Airlines Flight 175 fly into the South Tower.

Americans nationwide witnessed the same live coverage of airplanes turned into weapons of mass murder in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. And while the horror and brush with anarchy has dimmed a decade later, uneasiness lingers for plane crews and travelers alike.

“It’s a landscape of suspicion,” said Daniel Rust, assistant director of the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Missouri.

At security checkpoints, we strip off coats, shoes and belts. We extract 1-quart, zip-top bags of toiletries from carry-ons. We pass through body scanners and explosives detectors. We board with our eyes wide open.

“After 9/11 you started looking at who else was on the plane with you, what else people were carrying, what kind of bags they had,” said Cleveland attorney Andrew Pollis. “You started looking at how other people were also looking around. Looking at you. Looking at the people you were looking at.”

“A tremendous sense of anxiety”

The last moments of a pre-9/11 world for Pollis are embedded in a dry legal transcript.

“We need to go off the record for a minute,” said a lawyer interrupting a business dispute at a law firm in Florham Park, N.J., 30 miles west of Manhattan. The court reporter stopped transcribing. Fifteen attorneys moved into an office with the only TV set.

“All of us, hotly contested adversaries, bickering, argumentative, gathered in this room in a moment of bizarre solidarity, trying to understand what was going on,” said Pollis, now an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

“There was a tremendous sense of anxiety.”

Within an hour, airspace nationwide was closed to commercial aircraft. Pollis, eager to get back to Cleveland, snagged one of a dwindling number of rental cars. As he pulled onto Interstate 80, he saw off to the east the black smoke rising from the rubble of the twin towers.

The experience of “what can go wrong when someone wants to take advantage of our liberties and use them against us” has changed air travel for Pollis. Today he accepts airport rules that don’t fit his normal view of what government should be doing in people’s lives.

“So traumatized was I by the events that I said, ‘Look, I am willing to subject myself to whatever you want to do to me, because I want you to subject everybody else to that same scrutiny to make sure they’re boarding this plane without weapons.’

“For me that’s huge,” Pollis said. “I was prepared to give up a lot of my liberties for the security and safety I felt I had lost.”

A new top mission: Protect the cockpit

At Cleveland Hopkins International Airport — in fact all across the United States — Sept. 11 was a crystalline fall morning, what pilots call “severe clear,” a perfect day for flying.

Flight attendant Shawn Smith [agr: can’t identify airline: ]was in a crew room at Hopkins when word of the catastrophe flashed across CNN.

“We went into emergency response mode. The airport was evacuated. Calls started coming in from all over,” he said.

Smith rotated on 12-hour shifts at the operations center, helping to straighten out the logistics of crews that were stranded worldwide when U.S. air travel shut down.

“We brought back a limited number of flights each day until we returned to full operations,” he said.

The occupation Smith had joined 22 years earlier — when people smoked on planes and carried lighters, when friends looked out the window in the boarding gate area for your plane to land, when the captain let aviation buffs visit the cockpit — had taken a sharp turn.

“We had just become the last line of defense to the safety and security of those aircraft,” Smith said. Flight attendants who were trained to talk and negotiate with hijackers learned they had a new top mission: to protect the cockpit.

“I probably shouldn’t comment on that,” Smith said when asked whether flight attendants carry weapons. But he noted that “many tools” that were in the cabin pre-9/11, including pillows and blankets, are no longer around.

“You have to be very resourceful,” said Smith, an officer with the Association of Flight Attendants. “You have to be thinking of alternatives.”

Terrorists continue to target aviation more than any other potential weakness, Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano said this month.

While threats persist, the nation is stronger than it was a decade ago, she said. On July 21, she issued a report on the implementation of recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission, a panel assigned to diagnose the failures behind the terrorist attacks. Napolitano said her agency has made significant progress on most of the recommendations.

Late this year we may reach a milestone, a decade without a terrorist attack or hijacking against a major U.S. airliner. And flying is 20 percent cheaper when adjusted for inflation than in 2001. Still, many Americans have soured on air travel because of the security hassles, said veteran pilot Patrick Smith.

Mandatory shoe removal and limits on liquids were followed by body scanners, invasive pat-downs and a growing catalog of banned items. Check the list. You might be surprised at things like gel shoe inserts, granite cremation urns and empty camp stoves if they have fuel vapors.

There’s a reason for all of it, Napolitano said in an interview with the Associated Press. “Aviation continues to be the most-often referenced intel that we receive.”

Some gaps in security

Even as security measures multiply, critics ask whether some are excessive, while more critical safeguards have gaps.

Not all air cargo and packages are screened for explosives, Patrick Smith said. At the same time, caterers, fuel suppliers and others get access to the secure side of airports with the swipe of a badge.

“It’s the dirty secret nobody wants to talk about,” he said.

Air travelers, meanwhile, are bogged down at security lines. The search for weapons rather than specific people who might use them is misplaced, in Smith’s view.

A Transportation Security Administration officer once confiscated the butter knife that Smith packed to use for short layovers when restaurants are closed. He didn’t get it back even when he pointed out it was the very knife with small serrated teeth that’s used by diners in first class.

“There’s just this atmosphere of constant threat, be it real or imaginary,” Smith said. “Vigilance is seldom a bad thing. It also breeds paranoia and causes people to act irrationally.”

Derebey, the United pilot, said he knew from the moment he saw the second tower hit that flying would never be the same. “Our job was going to change. I didn’t know how. But it wasn’t going to be good.”

For five hours on Sept. 11, he moved planes away from terminal gates at O’Hare to remote spots of the field — out of reach of anyone who might try to commandeer one. Ground control was shut down and Derebey taxied the giant jetliners in radio silence.

When he returned to flying about 10 days later, he greeted each passenger. “I wanted to see who was back there,” he said. “I wanted to eyeball people.”

He kept a watch out for police and military officers or just big guys. Out of 180 people in the back of the plane, he wanted to know where his potential helpers were.

After about a year he quit standing in the cockpit door as a regular thing. He never picked out anyone who made him so wary he wouldn’t fly. Still, today, he gets an electric twinge every now and then from someone who boards. Not enough to mention it to anyone. But it’s there.

Source:  http://www.cleveland.com

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