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 bombing and hijacking threats grew, with the attempt to blow up flight Pan Am Flight 830 from Tokyo to Honolulu in 1982; the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the killing of a hostage by Hezbollah militants in 1985; and the killing of 270 people in the Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 by Libya, which had provided military training camps for PLO fighters from the late 1970s. 

The rise of Al-Qaeda in the 1990s saw bombs and weapons used against Air France Flight 8969 and other flights. On September 11, 2001, four planes were hijacked, with two made to crash into the World Trade Center towers, one into the Pentagon, and the fourth diverted safely into a field in Pennsylvania by the plane’s passengers, all of whom died to prevent a worse incident. Two months later, Al-Qaeda operative Richard Reid tried to detonate an explosive device hidden in his shoe. 

In August 2006, authorities uncovered a plot to bomb transatlantic flights using liquid explosives hidden in drink bottles, with continued threats of parcel bombs, laptop bombs and sabotage by airline and ground staff employees from the 2010s. 

It’s because of Reid, brought up in Birmingham, England, that airports insisted on passengers removing their shoes and other items of clothing for x-ray inspection, causing further delays of five to ten minutes. It’s because of Abdulla Ahmed Ali, Assad Sarwar, Tanvir Hussain and others—also from Birmingham—that carry-on fluids were immediately banned, and then limited to containers no larger than 100 cl, and that the “drink-it-or-bin-it” rule was brought in, all adding to further delays.

Threats by Palestinian assassins and would-be assassins in the 1970s showed how great the risk of terrorist outrages was to passengers, planes and airports, and led to the introduction in the UK of The Aviation Security Act in 1982. This brought in greater policing, aerodrome protection and enhanced screening procedures. Twelve years later, triple-A baggage rules were added to the burden of security, to ensure that all stowed items could be matched to passengers who had boarded, not just checked in by no-shows.

The World Trade Center bombings of 2001 made airport security screening still more thorough, with greater screening, more intense scrutiny of carry-on and hold luggage, more restrictions—and more waiting time, especially for overseas flights. It was those, and the foiled liquid-explosives plot, that made a three-hour check-in time for medium- and long-haul flights the new normal. Until then—it’s hard to imagine—one- to two-hour check-in times and almost casual inspections were perfectly common.

Palestinian violence, and the jihadi attacks that grew up to support and expand from it, are the reason not just for the tedious and time-consuming processing we now all have to endure but the vast increase in the cost of flying. 

At each airport, airlines have to pay millions for baggage-screening units, plus the staff to operate them, plus staff training, plus longer turnaround times, more aircraft, more crew hours, higher insurance premiums, and higher fuel costs because of the greater time that aircraft spend on the tarmac—with consequently higher environmental costs, too. 

Airports themselves have to instal and maintain metal detectors, X-ray machines, millimeter-wave scanners and explosive detection systems costing millions each. They also have to employ thousands of staff to operate this equipment, while meeting the cost of ongoing IT investment in passenger databases, watchlists, biometric scanners and CCTV systems to keep up with the increased ingenuity of terrorists themselves. All of this requires additional terminal space, all of which has to be heated, lit, ventilated and kept clean—another environmental cost.

As if this wasn’t enough, the Civil Aviation Authority in the UK, and its equivalent bodies overseas, have to spend billions of dollars to implement security mandates, and keep operations ticking over at a high level whether or not a specific threat is imminent.

If you’re used to paying, say, $1,000 for an overseas ticket, a good half of that could be due to the additional costs of protecting you from being bombed out of the sky by Islamic radicals, who don’t care whether you’re a church-goer, a member of Reform UK or the Greens, or someone who takes part in weekly protests chanting “From the River to the Sea”. 

So next time you find yourself at a standstill, in a fog of angry impotence, while robotic staff weigh your bag, ask you who packed it, make you queue up for passport and boarding pass validation, tell you remove your belt and place your laptop in its own tray, remove your powders and gels, have you pour away the drink you’d just bought in the airport marketplace, get you to remove your ear studs and nose rings (two minutes each), carry out pat-downs on you, call you aside for randomized interviews, or make you wait in a jet bridge for ten minutes before entering an aircraft, thank those of our friends who want to globalize the intifada.

And just remember: it was not always thus. We owe the horror of flying to a fraudulent, self-defining demographic fragment, supported by students, academics and peace protesters, who in the last hundred years allied themselves with Hitler and the Nazi Party to ensure that a patch of land that they had no necessary connection with was withheld from an ethnic minority with real millennial claims who had just come close to being annihilated in a genuine genocide.

For anyone who continues backing them, I wish you the joy of a four-hour check-in, when it comes.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)