Every time I fly, I come home saying, “Never again”—not because of what happens while I’m away but because of what’s involved in boarding a plane. I’m just back in London from New York and I’m still not over the dehumanizing awfulness of it all.

Many years ago, when I flew for the first time—no further than from London to Paris—I turned up at the airport an hour and a half before we were due to take off, handed in my passport and ticket at check-in, had my suitcase tagged and sent for loading, and was given a boarding pass. At security my passport was checked. I then walked to the departure gate—and that was it. 

Admittedly, there were fewer passengers in those days. Today, queues can snake back and forth for ten, twenty, thirty minutes, but there is also now biometric technology, which makes passenger-processing faster—and avoids human error.

What has made the whole routine from arrival to boarding horrendous are the security procedures brought in almost exclusively to counter Islamic militants, supported by their radical Arab, Islamic and leftwing friends, who see nothing wrong in killing indiscriminately in order to achieve their extreme nationalist ends and who uphold violence as glamorous, necessary and therefore lawful.

The troubles began in September 1970 when the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked four planes and had them land in Jordan—the Dawson’s Field hijackings. 

The killing of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian militants at the 1972 Munich Olympics, although not itself an air-related incident, drew worldwide attention to the vulnerability of civilians and increased the urgency of airport security awareness. Between 1974 and 1978, the Red Army Faction (in Germany) and Red Brigades (in Italy) collaborated with Palestinian groups to hijack flights. 

In the 1980s, the frequency of........

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