Word: aircrafting
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...meet his deadline for an annual in-flight "check"--part of the system that monitors pilots' skills throughout their career. "Most pilots are fatalistic," he said about his good fortune. But he and other TWA pilots had little, if any, doubts about the cause of the tragedy. "That aircraft has had 25 years' experience without a catastrophic accident," says a veteran, and "747s don't just fall out of the air." Adds the lucky first officer: "There is nothing a crew member can do to make a plane blow up like that...
...clock and an explosive that's powerful enough," says Ronay. On Pan Am Flight 103, the bomb was the size of a coffee cup, but it happened to be placed near the skin of the plane, where it broke through the fuselage and weakened the frame of the aircraft, causing the plane to break up. "If it had been inboard," says Ronay, "it might not have done that kind of damage. Luggage makes a good buffer." Terrorists may have been lucky with TWA Flight 800 as well...
...Before the Boeing TWA aircraft left for Kennedy airport, it was parked in Pit No. 22, where a team of some 15 maintenance experts inspected it," said Dionyssios Kalofonos, director of the Greek Civil Aviation Authority. "The plane was not left unattended for a minute." Furthermore, insisted Evangelos Markoulis, spokesman for the Public Order Ministry, "to be precise, a time-bomb device has 12 hours minus one minute to blow up. Therefore, if such a mechanism had been planted on board the aircraft, it would have gone off after it landed at Kennedy." A direct flight to New York from...
...tried to leave a bag with the bomb inside on the plane as he prepared to disembark. But the TWA airliner would have been swept of all bags in the luggage compartments and underneath passenger seats before the Paris-bound passengers were boarded and their luggage loaded onto the aircraft. On the New York-Paris leg, no bag would have been allowed aboard the plane without its passenger on board as well. The terrorist could have persuaded another passenger to unwittingly take his carry-on luggage with the bomb inside. However, airline officials at check-in counters ask every passenger...
...While the FAA had rated the four airports visited by its inspectors as "good to very good," undercover agents from the inspector general's office reached dramatically different conclusions. In 15 out of 20 attempts to gain entry to supposedly secure areas, agents had little trouble: they got into aircraft-parking areas, baggage areas, and one agent managed to slip an unarmed hand grenade through a metal detector...