But of all the half-baked measures we’ve grown accustomed to, few have been sillier than the longstanding policy decreeing that pilots and flight attendants undergo the same X-ray and metal detector screening as passengers. In the United States, this went on for a full twelve years after September 11th, until finally a program was put in place allowing crewmembers to bypass the normal checkpoint. It’s a simple enough process that confirms the individual’s identity by matching up airline and government-issue credentials with information stored in a database. That it took twelve years for this to happen is a national embarrassment, especially when you consider that tens of thousands of airport ground workers, from baggage loaders to cabin cleaners and mechanics, were exempt from screening all along. You read that correctly. An airline pilot who once flew bombers armed with nuclear weapons was not to be trusted and was marched through the metal detectors, but those who cater the galleys, sling the suitcases, and sweep out the aisles were been able to saunter onto the tarmac unmolested.

If there has been a more ringing, let-me-get-this-straight scenario anywhere in the realm of airport security, I’d like to hear it. The TSA will point out how the privileges granted to tarmac workers have, from the outset, been contingent upon fingerprinting, a ten-year background investigation, crosschecking against terror watch lists, and are additionally subject to random physical checks. All true, but the background checks for pilots are no less thorough, so why were they excluded?

Nobody is implying that the hardworking caterers, baggage handlers, and the rest of the exempted employees out there are terrorists-in-waiting. Nevertheless, this was a double standard so titanically idiotic that it can hardly be believed. Yet there it was, for longer than a decade.

Why am I bringing this up if it’s no longer happening? Because it’s still making my head spin, for one. But also, more valuably, it gives us insight into the often dysfunctional thinking of the security state. And past as prologue: such wasteful procedures, embedded for so long, can only make us skeptical about the future. //

The 1960s through the 1990s were a sort of Golden Age of Air Crimes, rife with hijackings and bombings. Between 1968 and 1972, U.S. commercial aircraft were hijacked at a rate of — wait for it — nearly once per week. Hijackings were so routine that over a four-month period in 1968 there were three instances of multiple aircraft being commandeered on the same day. Later, in the five-year span between 1985 and 1989, there were no fewer than six major terrorist attacks against commercial planes or airports, including the Libyan-sponsored bombings of Pan Am 103 and UTA 772; the bombing of an Air India 747 that killed 329 people; and the saga of TWA flight 847.

Flight 847, headed from Athens to Rome in June 1985, was hijacked by Shiite militiamen armed with grenades and pistols. The purloined 727 then embarked on a remarkable, seventeen-day odyssey to Lebanon, Algeria, and back again. At one point passengers were removed, split into groups, and held captive in downtown Beirut. A U.S. Navy diver was murdered and dumped on the tarmac, and a photograph of TWA Captain John Testrake, his head out the cockpit window, collared by a gun-wielding terrorist, was broadcast worldwide and became an unforgettable icon of the siege.

I say “unforgettable,” but that’s the thing. How many Americans remember flight 847? It’s astonishing how short our memories are. And partly because they’re so short, we are easily frightened and manipulated. Imagine TWA 847 happening tomorrow. Imagine six terror attacks against planes in a five-year span. Imagine something like the Bojinka plot being pulled off successfully. The airline industry would be decimated, the populace frozen in fear. It would be a catastrophe of epic proportion—of wall-to-wall coverage and, dare I suggest, the summary surrender of important civil liberties. What is it about us, as a society, that has made us so unable to remember and unable to cope? //

IN PERSPECTIVE: THE GOLDEN AGE OF AIR CRIMES