Armed air marshals could be aboard domestic flights this week. The first 22 graduates of a training program which began four weeks ago are ready to take to the air. The Federal Attorney-General, Daryl Williams, has confirmed the readiness of the marshals. The marshals come from the Australian Protective Service. This has given rise to objections from the Police Federation. The federation’s chief executive, Mark Burgess, said the positions should be filled by properly trained police.
The spat between Australian Protective Services and the police is of little moment compared to the broader question of whether we need a service at all. After all, the record of police services in Australia in subduing people who might pose a threat to security is rather mixed. The propensity to shoot, and inadvertently kill or unnecessarily injure seems too high. Transposing that record to an aircraft in the sky invites alarm.
But the whole idea of putting air marshals aboard domestic flights is deeply flawed. It seems as if it has come about because authorities and airlines felt that they had to do something after the September 11 attacks. It would have been better for them to stand there rather than just doing something.
It will not be possible to put a marshal on every flight. For a start, there are between 400 and 500 domestic flights in or out of Sydney every day. It would be ridiculously costly to put a marshal on each one. Moreover, Australia probably cannot insist on marshals on international flights. So, at best the air marshal plan is therefore deterrence value alone. It is absurd. It is based on the premise that anyone intending to hijack an aircraft in Australia will think: “”Oh gosh, it is just possible that one of the 22 air marshals might be on the flight, so we will abandon the plan.”
Even when the full complement of 111 marshals are trained by the end of next year, they can only be on a tiny fraction of the several thousand flights in Australia each day.
And what if a real hijacker is on an aircraft containing an air marshal. It probably will not help very much. Mr Williams has been very circumspect about details of weapons and training – under the usual guise of security — but it is just as likely that the air marshal will contribute to the likelihood of bloodshed as reduce it. Mr Williams assures us that the weapons carried by the marshals will be low velocity guns that will not penetrate the fuselage. Even so, any weapon on an aircraft can add to danger because it can be wrested from the air marshal and be turned from a defensive to offensive weapon.
Too often security jobs become boring and low paid. We are going to be paying for people to spend days on end travelling backwards and forwards on uneventful flights. And when the crisis comes, security so often fails.
We need to pay more attention to security at the time of people getting themselves and their luggage on the aircraft. Since September 11, that has tightened somewhat. But too often it has been done in a ridiculous blanket way. Nowadays at airports, harmless women have had nail files or tiny pairs of manicure scissors confiscated. The blanket rules indicate a lack of discretion on the part of security people, which in turn reveals a lack of training or that lack of the application of common sense and intelligence.
We also need to pay more attention to securing the cockpit of aircraft. If the new danger is suicide bombers intent on doing maximum damage on the ground – at least the ground damage could be prevented if the cockpit is secured in a way that hijackers could never take the controls of the aircraft.