Word: airport
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...Greek airport improvement may have happened in a roundabout way--and as a result the Clinton Administration may come under fire for trying to play politics with airline safety. Last February, White House aides tried to squelch a Transportation Department warning to American travelers about lax safeguards against terrorism at the airport. White House aides feared such a warning would prompt a frosty reception for Hillary Clinton when she visited Athens in March to witness the lighting of the Olympic flame. Outraged FAA officials protested that travelers shouldn't be kept in the dark about the warning--which was required...
...Greeks have indeed fixed their airport problem, how then could a bomb have been put aboard the TWA jet? A terrorist could have flown from Athens to New York and 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...
...week, U.S. authorities recommended, in Bill Clinton's words, "keeping an open mind." Outside the public spotlight, however, it was a different story. The CIA immediately fired off secret cables to its foreign stations, ordering intelligence officers to comb their sources for leads. Agents quietly began checking the Athens airport, where the TWA flight originated, for security breaches. The names of all the passengers who flew the Athens-to-New York City leg, as well as those who boarded the plane in New York, were traced through computerized data banks for links with terrorist groups. The Israeli, Jordanian and Egyptian...
What are you willing to give up to make air travel safer? An additional $50 a ticket? $200? An extra half-hour spent undergoing security checks at the airport, or twice that? More important still, how many of us--complacent in the knowledge of American technological superiority, shielded here from foreign terrorism for decades--even realize how perilous the state of airport and airplane security is? For years safety measures, many of which are now standard elsewhere in the world, have languished here--victims of cost-benefit analysis, competing business interests and glacial government bureaucracy...