By DAVID CHURCHILL
of disguising explosives, recruiting insid- ers and hijacking aircraft,” warned John Kelly, US secretary of homeland security at the time of the ban. He argued that the comprehensive measures were needed “because we cannot play international whack-a-mole with each new threat”.
Although intelligence gathering and monitoring are a crucial part of the aviation world’s defence, there is a belief that explo- sive detection tests are able to provide some degree of certainty if carried out by airlines and airports with sufficient resources. But much more is being expected of new technology in detecting threats on the ground pre-flight. New, smaller and
more mobile 3-D Computed Tomography (CT) scanners, for example, are currently being tested for baggage screening by the TSA at two US airports – Boston’s Logan and Phoenix Sky Harbour International Airport – and could eventually replace existing X-ray equipment. Previous hopes of a technological solu- tion to threats such as that posed by ‘shoe bomber’ Richard Reid’s 2001 attempt to bring down an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami, or the 2006 ‘liquid bombs’ and 2009 ‘underwear bomber’, have generally come to naught.
The liquid bomb threat was probably the most successful of all terrorist efforts in creating problems for millions of travel- lers. As a result, over the past 11 years, the
authorities have rigidly imposed limits on how much liquid can be carried aboard an aircraft.
There were some relaxations of the rules in 2014 to allow larger duty-free alcohol or perfume bottles to be taken through security screening by transfer passengers in special security tamper evident bags, or STEBS, but the strict rules on liquids largely remain in force.
An EU update on airport security in
August suggested there were no imminent moves to end or reshape the present restric- tions, with any hope now likely resting (again) on a possible technological solu- tion involving new sophisticated scanners using radio frequency technology to locate chemical particles in explosives.
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