Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

I think everybody should swallow hard and accept the fact that yesterday's supposedly aborted attack on our air transport system was actually a complete success. The fact that nothing and no one were blown up is irrelevant. The terrorists aren't trying to blow up aircraft—what they're doing is forcing authorities to make air travel so completely unpleasant that traffic drops below a level that will sustain the airlines. Without ubiquitous air travel, our economy would suffer in ways both obvious and nonobvious.

There's really no way we can reliably win this one, short of forbidding all carryons and strip- and cavity searching every passenger. It wouldn't take much of a modern explosive to cause dozens of deaths in an airliner cabin, even if the craft itself maintained function and structural integrity and landed intact. (Does anybody remember the Aloha Airlines plane that lost a good part of its upper fuselage somewhere over the Pacific? A flight attendant was sucked out of the cabin and killed, but the craft landed safely with only a few passengers suffering major injury and no additional deaths. Airliners are tough.) There's plenty of room inside things as small as IPods for lethal quantities of explosive. A laptop battery could be hacked to become half battery and half explosive, and the battery could still source enough current to start the device for skeptical security inspectors. An air trip could eventually become a hundred people in airline-supplied Kevlar gowns tied into their seats. A few folks might be willing to do that. I wouldn't.

And truthfully, even that might not be enough. I read an article once about things that ER surgeons have had to remove from the rectums of sexually peculiar people. There's plenty of room in there for a sausage casing full of plastique, which would most likely show up on X-rays as indistinguishable from nature waiting to take its course. A suicide bomber wouldn't even necessarily have to, um, excrete the device before detonating it.

What to do? I'd like to see us bring back large-scale rail travel, even if we have to figure out a system of subsidies to keep the lightly used routes running—but I admit that I'm dreaming here; such a plan would take a decade or more to become effective, and we have the problem right now. Besides, rails won't help with travel from overseas, where most of the danger probably lies.

Carol and I were going to fly back to Colorado Springs some time next week, but at this point we suspect we're going to rent a car one-way—a minivan, if I can find one—and drive home with QBit and some family heirlooms in the back seat. The era of cheap fares and easy air travel may be over. We were going to fly to the Cayman Islands for our 30th wedding anniversary in October. We may end up driving to Florida instead. So it goes.