Monday, Mar. 20, 1972
Holding Up an Industry
"Hijacking mostly for political purposes appears to be fading. We're now confronted with something else, probably even more dangerous: extortion. We're in a new and very dangerous phase."
That ominous and prescient prediction made last month by Federal Aviation Administrator John Shaffer came all too true last week, the most frightening that U.S. aviation has ever known. The episode began with a call to Trans World Airlines by a man who called himself Gomez. He directed officials to a Kennedy Airport locker containing it note saying that there were bombs on four TWA airliners set to go off over an 18-hour period; he would locate them all in exchange for a $2,000,000 ransom.
Before the week was out, one TWA plane, sitting empty in AP Las Vegas, was blasted apart. Another in New York was narrowly saved when a bomb in the cockpit was defused just minutes before detonation. Dynamite was found on a United Air Lines flight into Seattle. And, in a fourth incident not disclosed by the Government, TIME Correspondent Jerry Hannifin learned that two plastique explosive devices were concealed in spray cans aboard a United 727. The cans were discovered when a federal agent searching a suspected suitcase noticed a can of Right Guard and of Noxzema seemed too heavy. There were massive delays for passengers everywhere. and at President Nixon's order all U.S. airlines began a major tightening of aircraft security and passenger screening.
Miraculously, no one was injured in the rash of bomb planting, some not the work of Gomez but probably inspired by his example. (Airport switchboards across the country were flooded with crank calls of false bomb threats.) Gomez himself gave the location of the TWA bomb that was found, warning that it was on Flight No. 7, which had just taken off from New York for Los Angeles. The plane hurried back to Kennedy Airport and was emptied; then two sniffer dogs trained to smell out explosives boarded the ship. It was their first live test, and one of them located the device almost immediately in a briefcase in the cockpit, only twelve minutes before it was due to go off. That was scary enough, but the explosion that ripped through the forward section of a TWA 707 in Las Vegas was more frightening for another reason. The plane, which had landed from New York seven hours before, had been searched three times: before departing, in the air and after it arrived. Yet somehow, someone had managed to put the bomb into the cockpit undetected.
Vigorous Security. The general consensus within industry and government is that to pay an extortionist's demands simply invites more attempts. But with a fleet of 239 planes and a daily passenger load of about 30,000 at this time of year, TWA may have felt that it had to make an attempt to deal with Gomez. A private plane, perhaps containing the $2,000,000, flew from New York to Atlanta. It returned to New York four hours later, and a nervous TWA spokesman subsequently said that Gomez had not been heard from again by week's end.
All this produced the most vigorous security efforts in aviation history, measures that will now largely become a permanent part of U.S. air travel. At the direction of the President and the Department of Transportation, airlines from now on must increase the guarding of access to parked planes, tighten baggage and passenger scrutiny and make more strenuous efforts to prevent guns and explosives from being taken aboard commercial aircraft. The new procedures and equipment will cost the airlines dearly, and doubtless annoy and delay travelers. But there is no alternative to a menace that, unchecked, could cause serious disruptions for the U.S. air transport industry.
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