Word: airporters
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When the plane touched down at Malpensa airport outside Milan, I froze in my seat. I was spending a year here? In a country where I barely spoke the language and didn’t know anyone? And not even getting credit for it? What did I think I was doing...
...know when you've arrived by the number of American military aircraft lining the runway. Located 25 km north of the capital Bishkek, the U.S. air base at Manas - Kyrgyzstan's main airport - briefly hit international headlines after the Kyrgyz parliament, under pressure from Russia and China, voted to shut it down in 2009. The U.S government's offer to pay much higher rent meant that the base (now officially called a Transit Center in deference to local sensibilities) survived the threat of closure. It remains today as an embarkation point for troops bound for Afghanistan, and a reminder...
...danger. Take, for instance, the firing device that nearly brought the Northwest plane down. It was a chemical initiator, four common chemicals that progressively speed up the detonation. Any competent chemist can build one. Only small quantities of the chemicals are needed, and they can be easily smuggled through airport security. As for the explosive used in the Christmas attempt, PETN, it's everywhere and difficult to detect with the current airport-security systems...
...longer pull off the big one? For one thing, it's under more pressure. In preparing the 9/11 attacks, the hijackers and their bosses took dozens of international flights and repeatedly opened U.S. bank accounts under their own names. Al-Qaeda operated a document center at the Kandahar airport. All that would be virtually impossible today, as hordes of counterterrorism officials scrutinize financial transactions and cell-phone calls, and drones track al-Qaeda leaders around the clock. And while government no-fly lists remain flawed, at least they exist. Today, the number of suspected terrorists prohibited from boarding a plane...
...planes. The program was expanded following a flurry of hijackings in the late '60s. In 1970, U.S. Customs sent nearly 1,800 men and women to the U.S. Army's Fort Belvoir for "sky marshal" training. But as the attacks continued unabated, critics slammed the program as ineffective. When airport security measures improved (X-ray screenings of U.S. passengers' bags began in the early '70s), the marshal program deteriorated. After the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 to Beirut by Hizballah--in which an American passenger was killed--President Reagan expanded the program, swelling the number of marshals to nearly...