Some readers may be familiar with the origins of airport security screening. I wasn’t, however, and the history is pretty interesting. In the 1960s, airplane hijacking became surprisingly common:
The first skyjacking of a United States airliner occurred in May, 1961 with Cuba as the destination. Thus, a reverse flow of refugees from non-Communist to Communist countries began. The movement was slow at first; seven United States air hijackings occurred in the first seven years. However, in 1968, skyjacking suddenly became a major problem for United States aircraft. In that year alone, eighteen United States airplanes were air hijacked as well as twelve foreign airplanes. In 1969, the number of attempted air hijackings involving United States aircraft for the year had risen to forty, of which thirty-three were successful. Of the forty-six attempts on airplanes from other nations, thirty-seven were successful.Since 1969, the number of air hijackings each year has declined. In 1970, fifty-six successful air hijackings and twenty-eight unsuccessful attempts took place world wide, with eighteen successful air hijackings and eight unsuccessful attempts involving United States planes. In 1971, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reported twenty-seven attempted skyjackings on United States planes with twelve successful, and thirty-two attempts on foreign planes with eleven successful. Between January 1 and September 1, 1972, twenty-nine attempted air hijackings were made on United States aircraft of which eight were successful, and twenty-one attempts on foreign planes with eleven successes.
Patrick W. McGinley & Stephen P. Downs, Airport Searches and Seizures-A Reasonable Approach, 41 Fordham L. Rev. 293, 294–297 (1972).
Government-mandated security screening was tried fairly late in response to these hijackings; it wasn’t mandated until 1972. As recounted in United States v. Davis, 483 F.2d 893 (9th Cir. 1973):
On February 1, 1972, the FAA issued a rule requiring air carriers to adopt and put into use within 72 hours a screening system “acceptable” to the FAA “to prevent or deter the carriage aboard its aircraft of sabotage devices or weapons in carry-on baggage or on or about the persons of passengers.” This system was to require the screening of all airline passengers “by one or more of the following systems: behavioral profile, magnetometer, identification check, physical search.”
In July 1972, the President “ordered” the screening of all passengers and inspection of all carry-on baggage on all “shuttle-type” flights. On August 1, 1972, the FAA issued a directive that no airline “shall permit any person” meeting the profile to board a plane unless his carry-on baggage had been searched and he had been cleared through a metal detector or had submitted to a “consent search” prior to boarding. On December 5, 1972, the FAA ordered that searches of all carry-on items and magnetometer screening of all passengers be instituted by January 5, 1973.
The number of annual attempted hijackings dropped to single digits soon after, and then to zero or close to it.
Eli Rabett says:
You make Eli feel old. Of course there always is DB Cooper, dead or alive?
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November 2, 2009, 8:31 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
The rule used to be that the passengers were unhurt, which is why the hijackers usually got what they wanted. People were conditioned to sit still and be quiet. 9/11 changed that forever.
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November 2, 2009, 8:36 pmOren says:
Orin, how do you feel about the shift in legal justification from consent-search (as a condition of travel) to administrative-necessity-search?
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November 2, 2009, 8:39 pmWatchingTheWatchers says:
Red teams are still pretty good at breaching security. I suppose security measures do raise the bar in the sense that only a more talented (or lucky) subset of hijackers are likely to successfully hijack a plane nowadays.
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November 2, 2009, 9:04 pmSumBudy says:
Many years ago, I found an old magazine with an article about what to do if your airplane was hijacked. Some of the description almost seems comical and quaint today — apparently hijackers taking you to Cuba would sometimes order a round of drinks for everybody on the plane. Additionally, the article gave suggestions about how to enjoy your time in Havana until you were put on a plane back home. You were warned, however, not to upset the hijackers — they were a little edgy because they would face the death penalty if brought to justice in the US. The overall tone was that if your plane was hijacked, sit back and enjoy the ride, and if you didn’t cause any problems, you’d get back home safely.
I can’t remember the name or date of the magazine, but I think it was from the late 1960s.
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November 2, 2009, 9:13 pmbyomtov says:
The number of annual attempted hijackings dropped to single digits soon after, and then to zero or close to it.
You mean the market didn’t solve the hijacking problem, and that a (shudder) regulation was needed. Careful, Orin, you are about to be excommunicated.
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November 2, 2009, 9:17 pmOrin Kerr says:
I’m not sure I follow. Hijacking is the nonconsensual interference with property and security interests of another, not a market transaction: Does anyone argue that the market can solve crimes like hijacking?
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November 2, 2009, 9:32 pmSuperSkeptic says:
I don’t presume to be capable of such an argument, but I imagine it would go somewhere along the lines of: The airline company and the consumer bargain for their respective safety conditions and just accept the results. After all, it’s in their interest to be safe (to maintain customers as well as their planes) and in your interest to consent to some higher degree of search conditions for your own safety. Or you could just take the cheap plane co. that doesn’t screen at all.
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November 2, 2009, 9:42 pmSuperSkeptic says:
I’m sure there are some libertarians out there willing to take on the “Are you really willing to give up the FAA?” argument...
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November 2, 2009, 9:46 pmSuperSkeptic says:
Oh, and to be clear: That is not to say that the market would “solve” the crime of hijacking, or that hijacking shouldn’t be punished, merely that the market would minimize it’s occurrence most effectively. (And I was just playing Devils Advocate).
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November 2, 2009, 9:53 pmFub says:
Dunno. I never quite believed the FBI’s claim that no experienced skydiver would try a night jump in a rainstorm without a light source. Experienced skydivers have done all sorts of strange things, ie: stark naked relative work being among the least strange.
Cooper’s particular regulatory legacy, although less intrusive to passengers than screening, was the Cooper vane, ordered installed on 727s by the FAA around 1972.
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November 2, 2009, 10:03 pmToby says:
It shows that Nietzsche was right: if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. A few wackos and a fashion for passivity led to the end of free travel in this country. Further assisted by corporate marketing plans that wanted to make sure that no one traded their bizarre ticketing schemes (round trip less than half of a one-way, in some cases), travel became identified and tracked. I remember the after work line for the dinner and a play in San Francisco, paid for in cash or credit on the plane from San Diego.
Today, even though the use of my first name (I have never used it) actually endangers me in security scenarios (I don’t answer to it either), I am being peppered with demands to add full first middle last to all travel documents. If it is true that Al Qaeda does not like liberty, we have, at their bidding, given up a substantial component of it: freedom to travel. I remember when we mocked the Soviet Union for requiring internal passports. It’s funny how the left, whose troubadours used to sing about refusing to register their babies, (A Child is Born, Jefferson Airplane) will soon mock concerns about requiring permission to travel in response to this post.
“Necessity, the tyrant’s plea” — John Milton
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November 2, 2009, 10:18 pmbyomtov says:
Does anyone argue that the market can solve crimes like hijacking?
I think SuperSkeptic does a good job of outlining the market worship argument. Airlines want a reputation for not being hijacked. Therefore they will institute anti-hijacking measures without government involvement. To the extent theese are ineffective, it merely reflects the attainment of an optimum level of hijacking, considering various cost trade-offs.
It does sound stupid, Orin. I agree. But it’s not much different in form than, say, anti-OSHA arguments, or the like. I think you would be astonished at what some peope believe about the power of markets.
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November 2, 2009, 10:20 pmOff Kilter says:
Yes. Incredibly stupid to think of bizarre things like trade-offs. Better to agree to always spend more, since spending more on one problem never affects what you can spend on other problems.
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November 2, 2009, 11:04 pmOren says:
I don’t see why United cannot hire an Air Marshall just as well as the DHS ...
No thoughts on the changing rationale for the searches though? It’s a 4A softball!
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November 2, 2009, 11:10 pmRandy says:
Why was it such a fad to hijack a plane to Cuba? Is the food and music so compelling that you would risk the death penalty to get there?
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November 2, 2009, 11:17 pmOrin Kerr says:
I’m curious, what airports in the world do not have any security screening? Or has the entire world bought into this fashion?
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November 2, 2009, 11:28 pmWatchingTheWatchers says:
Some people were trying to escape from a workers’ paradise with an antagonistic relationship with its northern neighbor. Some people were trying to escape to a workers’ paradise with an antagonistic relationship with its northern neighbor.
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November 2, 2009, 11:32 pmbyomtov says:
Incredibly stupid to think of bizarre things like trade-offs.
Not my point. I’m just suggesting that the market didn’t solve the problem. Of course, if you think it would have then you are the answer to Orin’s question.
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November 2, 2009, 11:36 pmRicardo says:
I’ve flown through many countries and it seems universal aside from charter flights and maybe some regional domestic airlines operating in remote places outside the U.S. Even the 3 oz. liquid rule officially exists as a 100 mL rule in just about every country in the world although it isn’t necessarily evenly enforced.
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November 2, 2009, 11:45 pmuberVU - social comments says:
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by jasonmcclain: Fascinating history of airline security screenings ::: http://bit.ly/2Wmnm2...
Jeff Westbrook says:
Choosing to fly and choosing a carrier on which to fly is a market decision. Why didn’t the market force the airlines to make changes to their policies? Why didn’t the market provide adequate information as to which carriers had the best safety records, thus forcing the less safe carriers to adopt the same policies or procedures?
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November 3, 2009, 2:13 amGene Hoffman says:
The problem with our current Theater Security Agency is that there is no price to a brute force attack except for time. As such, it’s pretty easy to buy full fare refundable tickets and keep trying until one figures out how to circumvent security routinely enough to actually pull of a negative event...
–Gene
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November 3, 2009, 2:27 amFub says:
Of all the hijackers during that period, Cooper was the primary cause of a specific regulation. In 1972, the FAA ordered installation of the Cooper Vane (or Cooper Switch) on all domestic 727s.
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November 3, 2009, 6:59 amEli Rabett says:
The reason that the Federal Government took over airport screening in 2002 was that the market had failed. The screeners before that were hired by the airports and the charges passed on to the airlines.
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November 3, 2009, 7:25 amToby says:
Not exactly, Eli. Airline workers could still put box cutters on planes today, where they can be found by passengers later. The federal government took it over as a blatant power grab to expand the number of unionized governemnt workers — a huge expansion of the SEIU. That Bush went along,slowly, was part of the usual expected failures of the Bush administration
And several others seem prone to circular reasoning. The US has manadated that any country that wishes to fly a plane into the US (or connecting to one) use procedures that match those now used in the US–so this is apparantly confirmation that the US was adopting some sort of rational world consensus.
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November 3, 2009, 7:39 amJohn Burgess says:
There are countries whose airline security routines exceed those of the US.
In the bad old Saddam days, passengers could not carry anything–anything–on board an Iraqi aircraft, beyond the contents of their (screened) pockets.
Israel has been known to order strip and cavity searches of passengers for whom it had some level of suspicion. Many have been asked to take pictures of themselves prior to being permitted to carry their cameras on board.
India requires that batteries be removed from all battery-operated equipment before boarding. Batteries are kept in individually labeled bags in the cockpit and returned upon arrival.
Many countries require pat-down searches prior to boarding, particularly at times when there are global or country-specific alerts.
Now, these responses are in the result of the countries’ own experience with highjackings and bombings, so they have their own rationale.
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November 3, 2009, 8:52 amPintler says:
Answer 1:Freedom loving people wanted to escape the land of capitalist exploitation for the Caribbean worker’s paradise.
Answer 2:It was the closest reasonable place to hijack a plane that wasn’t likely to extradite you.
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November 3, 2009, 9:15 amPintler says:
I’m not sure the two positions are mutually exclusive: you could find an airline with agreeable security, and also prosecute hijackers.
I can choose to live in a building with unlocked doors, with locked doors or locked and alarmed doors, and with or without guards who may or may not insist on retinal scans and cavity searches on entry — but still want burglars prosecuted.
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November 3, 2009, 9:21 amSumBudy says:
Actually, I like having a single entity — the government — responsible for airline security. It provides a “buck stops here” measure of sanity, and if (when?) the government f*cks up and a terrorist comes up with a scenario that we couldn’t imagine, then I know exactly who to blame. It’s much easier to coordinate blame this way and throw the bums out.
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November 3, 2009, 9:38 amPintler says:
(apologies for the poor formatting above; Orin wrote only the first paragraph of the quoted text)
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November 3, 2009, 10:21 amRandy says:
Toby: “The federal government took it over as a blatant power grab to expand the number of unionized governemnt workers — a huge expansion of the SEIU.”
Nope. Completely wrong. In fact, this was the argument of Tom Delay & Co. when they attempted to prevent the government takeover of the screeners.
The reason the government took over the screeners is that after 9/11, many stories came out about the imcompetence of the screeners. Most were contracted under a single company that had close ties to republican politicians. The news reports proved that almost all the screeners were paid less than what you could earn selling donuts at the airport.
As a result, there were high turnover rates in these positions, and the people who took the jobs tended to be uneducated. I myself remember that most of them were lacksidaisical and could barely speak english.
So, after 9/11, the Dems proposed that the lives of passengers were too important to leave to a private company that clearly failed to prevent the 9/11 tragedy. Support for this was unusually high, around 70% if I recall correctly.
If this was nothing more than a power grab by the unions, then it was supported by the vast majority of the people because they thought government workers would do a better job than the private industry. One argue with this, but one can’t argue with the fact that we haven’t had any further incidents.
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November 3, 2009, 12:13 pmMalvolio says:
No, it doesn’t, since it doesn’t internalize the cost of hijacking to the hijacker. (Each airline, with or without government involvement, will struggle to find the optimum amount of hijacking for itself — considering the cost of hijacking and the costs of extra security — but that isn’t the optimum amount for the economy as a whole.)
There’s a saying that if you don’t understand your opponent’s argument, you don’t understand your own. If Byomtov actually believes that an argument about workplace safety resembles an argument about workplace crime, he doesn’t understand enough about libertarianism or about economics to be holding an opinion on either.
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November 3, 2009, 12:49 pmMalvolio says:
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm!
Lisa: That’s specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
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November 3, 2009, 12:52 pmDilan Esper says:
I’ve flown through many countries and it seems universal aside from charter flights and maybe some regional domestic airlines operating in remote places outside the U.S.
Actually, small regional domestic carriers in the US don’t screen either. (For instance, there’s an unscreened gate on the bottom floor of the Albuquerque airport terminal for flights to small cities in New Mexico.) I don’t know the exact scope of the regulation, but the basic idea is that flights in larger planes or between cities of significant population require screening.
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November 3, 2009, 1:49 pmMatthew Carberry says:
The test isn’t whether we’ve had any more hijacking attempts, attacking or not attacking is a decision made by the attacker.
The valid test of whether the new system of screening is a worthwhile (cost/benefit) improvement over than the old is whether, using the same testing methods, the system passes more tests.
By that metric, the new TSA driven system has apparently proven ineffective as it appears to allow the same percentage of test weapons and bombs through screening as the old.
But at least we have entertaining security kabuki to watch as we revel in no net gain in security, a definite loss of privacy and increase in cost, inconvenience and time.
The loafer manufacturing lobby also probably appreciates the changes.
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November 3, 2009, 5:08 pmRandy says:
Malvolio: “Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm!
Lisa: That’s specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.”
Aha! You took the bait! (I was hoping someone else would, actually). As we all know, defenders of George Bush’s War on Terror often said that the fact that there hasn’t been another attack on US soil since 9/11 is proof that his War is working. Others pointed out the ‘specious reasoning’ a la Lisa simpson.
Yes, it certainly is specious reasoning, as I will admit. Nonetheless, I believe that even today, most Americans prefer to have real government officials in charge of our screening that private companies.
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November 3, 2009, 5:29 pmOren says:
Yeah, that George W was a real union stooge. Please.
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November 3, 2009, 5:38 pmEli Rabett says:
Well, to pile on the big advantage of the government takeover is that there can be uniform hiring practices, training and testing.
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November 3, 2009, 7:41 pmPatHMV says:
There is a real cost to this screening. Market forces do win out in the end, despite government efforts to interfere. The cost, I think, is that there’s less air travel today. I don’t have the stats, but I know that I have several times decided to drive rather than fly to a destination about 8 or 9 hours drive away. This will, over time, tend to increase regionalization of cultures in the country. I also pollute more, I suspect, by driving rather than taking mass transit airplanes.
Why do I drive? The increased security is a big part of it. Leaving the pocket knife behind, the stress of the cattle-herding lines, the stress of trying to not delay the lines, while removing your shoes, taking your laptop out of the case, etc., etc., then reassembling your gear on the other side of the checkpoint. Then there’s the excess time it takes, having to arrive an hour early, at least.
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Pintler says:
And note that that cost is not just in time or hassle — flying is safer on a per passenger mile basis, so there is a cost in lives when people drive instead of fly.
There is presumably an optimal level of airline security which balances deaths avoided by preventing hijackings against deaths incurred by encouraging people to drive instead. Whether the current system is at that point is an interesting question.
n.b. that this can be a substantial effect. A recent book (‘Freakonomics’? ‘Predictably Irrational’? Sorry, drawing a blank at the moment) made a plausible case that the death toll from 9/11 was around 4500 — 3000 odd on 9/11 and 1500 over the next year as people drove instead of flying.
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November 4, 2009, 9:24 amDougla2 says:
Thank you. This helps me understand the rationale of AMTRAK not wanting to allow firearms in checked baggage (which is not completely isolated from passenger areas) until they get airport-style screening of passengers.
They are concerned that someone might hijack a passenger train and take it to Cuba.
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November 4, 2009, 11:52 amLibrary: A Round-up of Reading « Res Communis says:
[...] The Origins of Security Screening at Airports – Volokh [...]
Rafael says:
Manuilsky, a prominent Soviet professor at the School of Political Warfare, said: “The bourgeoisie will have to be put to sleep. We shall begln by Launching the most spectacular peace movement on record. There will be electrifying overtures and unheard-of concessions. The capitalist countries, stupid and decadent, will rejoice to cooperate in their own destruction. They will leap at another chance to be friends.” And Khrushchev, a more contemporary Soviet prime minister, said: “We cannot expect Americans to jump from capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans doses of socialism until they suddenly awake to find out they have Communism.”
http://www.marianland.com/marx01.html
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November 22, 2009, 12:33 pm