MONTREAL - Aviation changed the world 10 years ago, which in turn changed aviation forever. The instant those hijacked planes slammed into their targets, airline security became synonymous with national security.
That’s not surprising, said Raymond Benjamin, secretary-general of Montreal’s International Civil Aviation Organization in an interview. “It was the first time airliners were used as a weapon of armed destruction.”
The first and most obvious victim of the subsequent exaltation of security into a quasi-religion was the patience of travellers, followed by their liquids, gels, shoes and belts. The chaos caused by more and longer lineups further degenerated in the U.S. into exhibitionist full-body scanners and the occasional 6-year-old girl and wheelchair-bound grandmother being brusquely frisked or interrogated.
Maddening waits and lineup shuffles and the loathed front-line indignities are not the only effects 9/11 had on flying.
There’s the $7.5 billion U.S. spent worldwide last year on airport security, said Pierre Jeanniot, former president of Air Canada and of International Air Transport Association, based in Montreal – much of that money over and above what was spent previously and another added cost to your airline ticket that is now firmly embedded.
Cockpit doors were reinforced – and kept locked. Passports are encoded with greater security measures. And as of last month, said Esmé Bailey of the Canada Border Services Agency, nearly 450,000 Canadians and about 125,000 U.S. citizens had received NEXUS cards that can identify passengers who have been thoroughly vetted through retinal imprints at border crossings.
But Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace consultant at Teal Group in Fairfax, Va., argues that “the most remarkable thing about 9/11 is that although it was a huge tragedy, it changed nothing.
“Air travel growth rates resumed at their historical pace. While security became less pleasant, it never became enough of a burden to discourage travel.”
ICAO figures support his contention. A spokesperson, Denis Chagnon, wrote in an email that there were 1.64 billion airline passengers worldwide in 2001, “down from 1.67 billion the year before,” the result of 9/11 and a recession. “Traffic returned to pre-2001 levels in 2003, with 1.69 billion passengers that year” and are now at 2.5 billion passengers a year.
Benjamin projected that would double to 5 billion by 2030.
But numbers are only one part of the tale. A historic structural shift has shaken the industry, said aerospace consultant Scott Hamilton of Seattle’s Leeham Co. LLC.
“You’ve seen the emergence of a lot more low-cost carriers since 9/11 as the legacy airlines have either consolidated or gone out of business,” he said.
Discounters like Indonesia’s Lion Air and Air Asia in Malaysia have grown precipitously since then, Hamilton added. “JetBlue has grown (faster) in this country, WestJet also in Canada. There are more opportunities as the legacy carriers restructure or disappear altogether. I mean, (Irish no-frills airline) Ryanair now carries more passengers than British Airways – and Southwest carries more people in the U.S. than any other airline.”
Conversely, national and traditional airlines, especially in Europe and the U.S., disappeared, including Sabena and Swissair, or merged, like Air France with Holland’s KLM, Lufthansa with Swiss, Delta with Northwest, US Airways with America West, United with Continental, etc. Or, like Air Canada, heavily restructured – including plans to start their own low-cost-carrier division.
As Air Canada, United, American, Delta, Continental, US Airways and most others took scads of capacity out of their system, sought bankruptcy protection or laid off tens of thousands of people – or all of the above – Southwest did not fire any employees and merely parked planes for some months.
“They resumed their growth within a year,” Hamilton said.
The U.S. Travel Association has a very different take on the lasting effects of that dark day. Geoff Freeman, executive vice-president of the U.S. Travel Association, acknowledged the overall growth of air travel in an interview.
But his latest survey concludes that “since 9/11, international travel has represented a lost opportunity for the U.S. economy and American jobs.”
There are no figures for Canada, but U.S. travellers on average scrap two to three trips per year solely because of “unnecessary hassles associated with the security screening process,” Freeman said.
The cost to the U.S. economy of these domestic trips not flown? About $85 billion U.S. and 900,000 jobs, according to the USTA.
“While global long-haul travel grew 40 per cent from 2000 to 2010, overseas travel to the U.S. during this same time frame rose just two per cent.”
The U.S. market share of global travel fell to 12.4 per cent last year from 17 per cent in 2000.
Although some of that might be because tourism to Asia and Latin America is booming, many foreigners are deliberately forsaking U.S. destinations because of travel hassle – and anger at the intrusion on their privacy.
Benjamin, however, suggested that was hyped: “There are no riots at airports by people saying they don’t want security there anymore.”
And he offered a small measure of comfort. “In the not-too-distant future, we will be able to get rid of restrictions on liquids and gels,” Benjamin said, when equipment able to detect liquid explosives is installed at airports.
In his capacity as president of the National Airlines Council of Canada, George Petsikas, an executive at Montreal’s Transat A.T., said 600,000 jobs in travel and tourism in Canada depend heavily on air travel.
“The danger is that people say, ‘To heck with it, I can’t do this (airport hassle) thing anymore, I’m gonna rebuild the porch instead.’ So that’s a real concern for us. It’s a huge cost and we need to find the right balance” between security and a reasonable flow of passengers.
Hamilton corroborates travel lobbyists’ point anecdotally.
“We see it here a lot,” he said. “It’s a four-hour drive straight down the interstate from Seattle to Spokane, 250 miles (about 390 km). It’s a 55-minute flight on a (Bombardier) Q400 (turboprop). Well, if you have an hour’s flight and you have to be at the airport two hours ahead of time, and then on the other side, catch a cab or rent a car or whatever, now you’re pretty close to four hours – before you consider weather or airport delays or aircraft (mechanical breakdowns). I drive. And so do many other people.
“Down in Texas, Austin is 180 miles (280 km) from Dallas, and that used to be a bread-and-butter route for (Texas-based) Southwest Airlines. People just drive it now.”
The hit on short-haul flights worked its way through eventually to Bombardier’s Q400 and regional-jet sales – and ultimately resulted in thousands of layoffs in Montreal’s aerospace sector before rebounding in the middle part of the decade.
Fuel costs are largely to blame, but Hamilton said that “had you not had 9/11, the growth would have been higher because you’d still have people flying between Spokane and Seattle and Austin and Dallas and what have you.”
It’s not been all bad for aviation.
Mushrooming fuel and security costs make it that much harder for airlines to make money and prompted them to “go to manufacturers and say ‘Look, we need more economical airplanes,’ ” added Hamilton. The result? Boeing Co.’s 787 Dreamliner, Airbus SAS’s A350 and Bombardier’s $3-billion CSeries program, a shot in the arm to Quebec’s economy.
Malcolm Andrews, a spokesperson for Via Rail, said the sharp spike in rail travel right after 9/11 abated in 2002, but growth since then has been steady. And train passengers surveyed cite the grim airport experience as a major reason why, second only to the downtown-to-downtown advantage.
Freeman, IATA and a host of other aviation players have said for years that it’s time to move past the 9/11 everyone-is-a-suspect mindset and adopt an assessment system at airports that gauges a flyer’s risk based on background checks.
But Mathieu Laroque, a spokesperson for the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, which manages Canada’s airport security, said: “That’s not for the near future.”
The impetus will have to come from government regulators, and governments will not move until international standards are adopted.
Benjamin, whose organization is responsible for getting states to agree to international standards, said he agreed “conceptually” with IATA’s checkpoint of the future notion, which rests on facilitating movement through airports of people whose background has been investigated by intelligence services.
“But the way it will be designed will not necessarily be the one IATA has on paper,” Benjamin noted.
It would appear that the checkpoint of the future is in the far-off future.
Meanwhile, Laroque said, “our main focus and goal will be to improve the efficiency of the checkpoints” to reduce bottlenecks, including the recent reduction in the number of airport contractors who manage Canada’s airport security to four from 12.
CATSA has instituted special lanes for families with small children and for people with special medical needs, including larger X-ray machines for strollers and folded wheelchairs.
But the contractors’ task will be “to propose new and innovative solutions” for the continuing wait time and congestion – neither of which can be quantified, Laroque said.
Another less tangible, lasting effect of the post-9/11 security-is-everything mentality is the resulting loss of privacy – and sovereignty.
Canadians now flying over U.S. territory, however briefly, must submit to the Secure Flight program. This program requires Canadian airlines to submit their passenger lists to U.S. authorities, even though no Canadian law required such a thing. In fact, the Aeronautics Act that actually prohibited Canadian carriers from sharing information about their passengers was amended on March 23 to “permit air carriers to share information with the United States for flights that overfly the continental U.S.,” said Lisa Filipps, a spokesperson for Public Safety Canada.
“This approach continues to balance the privacy rights of travellers with the need for a safe and secure air transportation system.”
Doug Reid could not disagree more.
The professor of strategy at Kingston’s Queen’s University’s School of Business said that in addition to the “horrid” experience, flyers, “sadly, are guilty until proven innocent.”
“The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is essentially null and void the instant you get to an airport,” Reid said.
“For all intents and purposes, CATSA conduct illegal searches and they know it. CATSA people use contrivances to work around that. When they ask permission to look into your bag, they’re not being nice, they have to legally. If you object, they don’t let you get on the airplane, which is very insulting and quite ridiculous. Last time I looked, we still had the right to disagree.”
In fact, he argued, what began as an aviation problem has poisoned the well and eroded whatever sense of social cohesion existed before.
The political discourse, especially in the U.S., until then, said Reid, “always kept one eye on ‘What is the good of the nation?’ That’s essentially been poisoned. There is no good of the nation anymore. It’s the good of the political parties and those in power. The hostage-taking situation around the U.S. debt recently is a good example of that.”
The question of whether the terrorists won is “stupid,” Reid said, “because what is ‘win’?”
“But did they change the way we live? Absolutely,” including the diversion of many billions of dollars, “maybe trillions” into security and wars instead of health care, education or infrastructure.
“We aren’t enslaved as the terrorists would want – but there’s no question we are less free now than we were 10 years ago.
“What I find most troubling is the presumption of access by government to personal records simply for the purpose of vetting or validating individuals’ motives or bona fides. The only place government can’t look now is inside our heads.”
Aboulafia said that “a high-tech approach to streamline security might help – or not. So, while a smoother system with greater use of human intelligence might help, it probably won’t make much difference.”
Although infinitely less spectacular than the terrorist attacks a decade ago, another incident last October when explosives found in printer cartridges bound for Europe or the U.S. were found in time, has renewed the focus on cargo screening, which lags badly behind that of people.
“Cargo is the next frontier,” ICAO’s Chagnon said.
Jim Marriott, chief of aviation security for ICAO, said that the process of a secure supply chain – tracking and controlling freight from a product’s factory line until it makes its way onto an aircraft – is revving up.
Jeanniot noted the irony of the U.S. obsession with security. “For us in aviation, the genesis of this concern was the Lockerbie incident,” when a Pan Am airlines 747 was brought down over Scotland by Libyan saboteurs.
“IATA had instituted a baggage reconciliation process adopted by most of the world,” a program that made sure no luggage could be placed on an airliner unless its owner also boarded the aircraft.
“The U.S. didn’t do that – they said it was too cumbersome for all their domestic and international flights. After 9/11, though, they adopted the international standards in short order.”
And Hamilton has a tongue-in-cheek warning about over-reliance on technology.
“The last time I was in Montreal, I was with a colleague who has the NEXUS pass.
I waited in the regular line with everyone else, but made it through before him. The NEXUS kiosk didn’t work.”