A Scary New Flaw in Airline Security

HOW could three Japanese have flown from Rome to Tel Aviv with a suitcase full of submachine guns and hand grenades undetected? The answer is that they apparently discovered a new flaw in airline security.

The first terrorist threat to jets was skyjacking, which is being countered in several sophisticated ways. They include body searches and hand-baggage checks by magnetometers that can signal the presence of metal and alert security men to weapons. Such techniques are not totally effective; last week a skyjacker demanding $500,000 took over a Western Airlines plane en route from Los Angeles to Seattle. Another armed skyjacker, asking for $200,000 in cash, charged aboard a parked United Air Lines jet in Reno, Nev.

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Luggage in the hold had not been scrutinized because it was assumed that skyjackers needed their weapons in the cabin. In addition, psychological profiles sifted from the characteristics of skyjackers in 268 such incidents since 1969 are also available to identify potential troublemakers.

More recently terrorists have developed a new technique by leaving bags containing barometric-pressure bombs that detonate at specific altitudes to be put aboard jets. Airlines responded by requiring passengers to hand over luggage personally on the assumption that no one flying in an airplane would bomb it. Now they are also experimenting with dogs that can sniff out explosives.

Up to now, however, no one contemplated a third threat: that terrorists would stow their weapons aboard for action on the ground. Just as new fences appeared at U.S. airports following a rash of bombs on TWA planes, airlines will try to close this latest security gap with a more extensive baggage search. The question is to what extent passengers will put up with such checks.

Sophisticated new X rays can scan bags without damaging even a roll of film, but they cost $100,000 apiece. The more practical magnetometers, ranging from $800 up to $8,000, detect any kind of metal from a traveling clock to a bra's metal hooks and eyes, and bags would still have to be opened for complete examination. To do that with every piece of luggage going aboard a Boeing 747 would mean passenger check-ins hours earlier than at present. That would eliminate the speed and convenience which are any airline's selling points.

In this shifting warfare, responsibility for security is often difficult to define. The three Japanese last week were checked through a magnetometer at Rome's airport while their uninspected bags were being stowed. Rome Airport Police Chief Pietro Guli insists that baggage is the responsibility of individual airlines. Meanwhile International Air Transport Association Director Knut Hammarskjold calls airport security everywhere "inadequate."

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Security varies from airline to airline and from route to route. In too many cases it appears to be slipshod, even on flights to Israel, which presumably are among those most closely checked. Raul Maldonado, 38, a member of the decimated Puerto Rican pilgrimage on Air France Flight 132 last week, insists that security was poor. Maldonado, who was unhurt in the shooting, told TIME Correspondent Marlin Levin: "No one searched me bodily and no one searched my hand baggage when I got on at Orly."

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